


Ghosts and Shadows

by Ghislainem70



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Adventure, Alternate Universe - Victorian, Angst, Episode: The Abominable Bride, First Time, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Oscar Wilde - Freeform, Romance, The Abominable Bride, UST, Victorian Sherlock Holmes, bram stoker - Freeform - Freeform, victorianlock
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2017-07-16
Packaged: 2018-04-25 13:14:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 29,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4961959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ghislainem70/pseuds/Ghislainem70
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Victorian Sherlock AU, inspired by Sherlock: The Abominable Bride.  During the trials of Oscar Wilde, Sherlock Holmes' past with the Hellbenders, a shadowy Cambridge club, comes back to haunt Holmes and Watson, and Bram Stoker is pursued by an ancient darkness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Vile and Unnatural

Ghosts and Shadows.  Chapter One: Vile and Unnatural

 

April, 1895 

221B Baker Street, Marylebone, London.

 

Bags had been unpacked, coats hung, dusty traveling clothes changed for dressing gowns, and now they lounged comfortably in their chairs on either side of the fire cradling glasses of whisky, Watson's half-drained, Holmes's nearly untouched. The stimulation of the lately concluded case -- the death by decapitation of Lord N---- ton -- was still evident in Holmes's heightened colour, and the restlessness of his slender hands that ventured from shuffling the inevitable pile of correspondence, to rosining the bow of his violin, to filling his pipe with his specially-mixed tobacco, cradling the bowl of his pipe.

The clock struck one. Watson set his pen down. His brain was uncommonly fuzzy from the comforts of 221B, their late supper, the warmth of the spirits.   He looked at Holmes. His fine profile was outlined in the fire, and as he looked steadily into the flames Watson thought he might be settling into one of his deceptively languid states, rare as an eclipse and as potentially dangerous. And as with real eclipses, Watson found himself tempted to stay and watch it unfold. He tried to picture the steep flight of stairs to his tidy bedroom, the narrow iron bed waiting for him, but he found himself quite unable to rise from his chair. His eyelids were getting heavy, though – they had hardly slept these past few days-- and he could not maintain a pretense of occupying himself with writing in order to stay up by the fire with Holmes. Not that Holmes was likely to notice if he stayed or went.

Watson put his notes aside and reached for the cast-off pile of correspondence, idly turning them over. Here were commonplace pleas for the assistance of the great detective in locating missing persons, extravagant promises for a share in lost treasure, anonymous accusations of crimes petty to monstrous. 

One envelope was unopened. He held it nearer the firelight. The folded paper was sealed with red wax, a coat of arms and the letter “Q”. The name was written in a crabbed, almost indecipherable hand, but Watson's eyes were accustomed to the scribbling of medical practitioners and he was just able to make it out. This was made easier by the fact that the name was notorious in London at this particular moment.

"Holmes. Did you see this?"

Holmes didn't turn from his contemplation of the fire. "Yes."

"You didn't open it."

"No." 

Holmes made a show of refilling his pipe as he broke the seal and unfolded the letter.

" _5 April 1895_

_The M---n Club_

_18 Welbeck Street_

_Marylebone, London_

 

_Sherlock Holmes, Esq._

_221B Baker Street_

_Marylebone, London_

_Dear Mr. Holmes,_

_I require your assistance on a matter of urgency. I am given to understand that you have lately been absent from London -- but a man in your position must be acquainted with the facts of my case, which the press have spread throughout England, to the dishonour of our name. The work will not present any difficulties.   My base accuser, Mr. Oscar Wilde, has conducted himself with such wanton abandon that it will be no great challenge to locate witnesses willing to attest to his most vile and unnatural nature. My lawyers have proved my innocence but I wish to do all that I may to assist the Crown in pursuing this notorious seducer of men to the full extent of the law._

_I shall call upon you tomorrow afternoon at 1:00 to engage your services._

_Yours respectfully,_

_John Sholto Douglas_

_Marquess of Queensberry_

_p.s. I attended your match at the West London Boxing Club last year. I have never seen your better. I am still holding your cup as you departed before I had the honour of presenting it to you._

  

The close warmth of the room fell away. Watson felt as chill as if they were still on the cold, dank marches of the countryside from which they had just returned. To his shame, his hand shook, crumpling the paper. The sound seemed very loud in the silence of the room. 

With two long strides Holmes was at his side. He snatched the paper from Watson's fingers and threw it into the fire. They watched the flames consume it.

"Holmes. . . "

"I ought to have burned it before, Watson. And to answer your question, no. I am not -- that is to say, we are not taking the case." 

Watson looked up into Holmes's face but it was as impassive as the Egyptian pharaoh carved in stone he had lately seen in the British Museum. 

He could not say what he felt, and he was not prone to discussing such things in any event, but it seemed good to see the ashes of the letter dusting the hearth. He thrust his trembling hand into the pocket of his dressing gown.

"Good night, Holmes." 

Holmes's expression might have altered, but it might have been a trick of the dying firelight. He settled back into his chair with a heavy volume, a German title on the spine, and began to read. 

Watson climbed the narrow stairs to his room, carefully folded his dressing gown on the chair, and settled into his bed. Exhausted as he was, sleep would not come. He gave up keeping his eyes closed and stared resolutely at the blotches on the ceiling, listened to distant noises in the streets. Not for the first time, the name “Oscar Wilde” kept him awake until dawn. He didn’t allow himself to ponder whether the case was the same for Sherlock Holmes.


	2. Nutrisco Aut Extinguetur

Ghosts and Shadows, Chapter 2: _Nutrisco Aut Extinguetur_

 

The next morning began, not with convivial breakfast chatter, with Watson encouraging Holmes to revisit their most recent adventure, enjoying Holmes's displays of brilliance, wit, and often in the privacy of their rooms, humour.

This morning, Holmes's humour was black. A slightly crumpled letter lay folded next to his untouched plate. The furrow between his brows deepened as he pulled on his pipe. Watson despised the fact that he took note even of the periodic little click of Holmes's teeth on the stem, that signaled to Watson as clear as Morse code that something was disturbing his companion.   Possibly it was Queensberry's letter of yesterday, requesting -- no, demanding -- Holmes's services to procure adverse evidence in the case against Oscar Wilde. He had lost sleep over it himself, although since Afghanistan he was no stranger to sleepless nights.

"Smoking for breakfast, Holmes?"

No answer. Holmes had undoubtedly heard him, as would be proved when Holmes answered in an hour or two. Watson tucked in to a grilled chop, proceeding to the eggs, bacon, sausages, and toast. Their meals had been irregular during their recent case in the country.

Holmes slipped the letter from the table and into his pocket.

"'The Case of the Headless Nobleman,'" Watson announced. "I think that shall be the title when I write up the case. What say you?"

Holmes stood up. "Watson, I wonder if you might do me a favour."

Watson rose instantly. "You don't have to ask, Holmes. What is it?"

Holmes fumbled about for paper and pen. He scrawled out a hasty note and folded it. "Would you deliver this for me?"

"Now? Of course, but why can't you trust the post?"

"I'm afraid it's urgent, Watson, most urgent. Will you please go now --"

There was a knock at the door, and Mrs. Hudson appeared.

"Tell him to come back tomorrow, Mrs. Hudson," Holmes fairly shouted. Watson thought his colour looked odd, a bit hectic. He felt the spark of suspicion.

"Holmes," he said in a low voice, "please tell me you aren't --"

"-- For god's sake, Watson, can't you do as I ask without cross-examining me? Please go, it is vital to me that you leave this instant."

Watson drew himself up. "Of course, Holmes." He took the letter, examined the address, and pulled on his overcoat.  

Holmes's forehead was glistening slightly with perspiration, although the fire was low and the room perfectly comfortable.  Watson stopped himself from staring at this.

"Am I to bring a reply?" He asked coolly.

Heavy footsteps were approaching on the stair.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Holmes. He did say he was sorry to be early," Mrs. Hudson said.

"That I am, Mr Holmes, Doctor Watson, that I am. I see I'm interrupting your breakfast. But --"

Holmes turned his back on Inspector Lestrade of the Metropolitan Police. Watson felt a pang in the centre of his chest at the obviousness of Holmes's ploy.

"Not at all. Holmes and I are quite finished, Inspector Lestrade. I'll leave you to discuss what is no doubt important police business. I myself have very important errand.   Of the utmost urgency."

Inspector Lestrade looked from Watson to Holmes's turned back.

"Thank you, Watson," Holmes muttered.

Watson slammed the door very, very hard, causing Mrs. Hudson to shriek.

"All this banging about!  Kindly refrain from door-slamming, if you please. And won't your wife be wanting you at home after your journey, Doctor Watson?"

Watson declined to speculate whether his wife did, or did not, want him at home. Conveniently, that was not in question at the moment.

"Mrs Watson is still away, Mrs. Hudson. Visiting her cousin."

Watson went out into Baker Street and hailed a cab. Mrs. Hudson closed the door softly, returning to her own rooms.

"Cousin? I thought it was an aunt," she muttered to herself, shaking her head. She had never known a married lady to travel apart from her husband quite so much as Mrs. Mary Watson did. She wasn't sure if the feeling she had was disapproval or envy, but she had a strict rule not to dwell on uncomfortable things. Today was mending day, and so she took out her basket and got to work.

# # #

"I'll come straight to it, Mr. Holmes. I wish Dr. Watson was here, as this concerns him as well."

Holmes whirled, his lean face concentrated into a singularly fierce glare.

"I assure you, there is no possible way in which Dr. Watson can be allowed to be touched by this. Now, before he comes back, let me hear your story."

Lestrade looked about the room, observing the half-eaten breakfast, newspapers strewn about, Holmes's peculiar "experimental" apparatus on every possible surface, the traveling trunks still by the door. He had rushed to get to Holmes's Baker Street rooms at what was an ungodly early hour, but now that he was here, he couldn't find the way to start. It was a horrible, degrading, foul thing. But scandal, like murder, will out, he reminded himself.

"I'd better just show you," Lestrade said, mentally upbraiding himself for cowardice. He couldn't just come out with it. He held out a paper bearing an elaborate drawing.

Holmes examined it. Lestrade held his breath, hoping against hope that he would see one of Holmes's rare smiles. Holmes was going to tell him it was all a joke, and explain it all.

Holmes was pale, but not the pallor of faintness. Holmes was in the grip of a fury. He made a brief motion as if he might throw the thing into the fire, but before Lestrade could cry out a warning Holmes instead reached for his magnifying glass and began examining the drawing minutely.

Lestrade knew from experience that this could possibly go on for hours.

"Holmes. What does it mean? The picture? It is. . . I mean, is it some sort of riddle?"

The drawing had been delivered in a sealed envelope to Scotland Yard the previous evening by a ragged boy who no one remembered, addressed to Detective Inspector Lestrade. Inside the envelope was an engraving, as fine as might be seen in an illustrated novel.  

The engraving appeared at first glance to be a coat of arms. It depicted two lizard-like creatures, entwined. Something about the details of light and shadow made it appear that the creatures were writhing in a carnal embrace.

The lizard on the left had the unmistakable face of Sherlock Holmes. The lizard on the right had the face of Dr. Watson. Both were drawn in precise imitation of the illustrations to Dr. Watson's famous stories of his adventures with the great detective, Holmes in his deerstalker, Dr. Watson with his great moustaches. Although the sinuous creatures were rather beautiful, the overall effect was to Lestrade's eyes repulsive.

" _Nutrisco aut extinguetur_ ," Holmes read out the motto beneath.

"I don't suppose Dr. Watson's, ah, illustrator, could have done this? It looks very like his work,"   Lestrade ventured. He hoped that it was. Just a literary prank. Nothing more than that.

"So you read Dr. Watson's adventures in the Strand, Lestrade. It as just for the elucidation of the police that I allowed Dr. Watson to publish my work. I often have expressed the wish that he could keep to the facts and to my methods of deduction. Never have I wished for it more than at this moment, Lestrade."

"So it isn't a prank, Mr. Holmes. Then I have to tell you the second bit. It came with a note."

"Read it, Lestrade." Holmes was absorbed in inspecting the engraving and did not look up as Lestrade read.

" _Detective Inspector Lestrade of the Metropolitan Police:_

_You are known to be trusted by Mr. Sherlock Holmes of 221B Baker Street, London. As such, you have been chosen to deliver the enclosed to Mr. Holmes, which you must do without delay. I beg that when you do so, that you inform Mr. Holmes of our intention that it be printed in a publication of national circulation within the week, unless Mr. Holmes is prepared to immediately comply with the recent request for assistance made to him in connection with a matter touching upon the honour of a noble family._

_If Mr. Holmes cannot recall the nature of the matter, the enclosed should act as an aid to his memory as well as an incentive to spur his energies in vigorous pursuit of the matter_."

 

"It has no signature," Lestrade observed.

"I know who sent it."

"Do you? Who is it?"

"I am not at liberty to say," Holmes said absently.  

"Mr. Holmes, if you want my advice, I would take on this case, whatever it may be, rather than let this foul picture be put in the papers for every man in England to see. This is a very bad time for such a thing, if you understand my meaning. A very bad time indeed."

Holmes looked up then, his face expressing to Lestrade's astonishment a profound sadness.

"I assure you that the one thing I cannot do is to engage myself in the matter mentioned."

Lestrade stood up and paced the room in confusion. Holmes was never willing to articulate his innermost thoughts and motives, not even to Dr. Watson if the stories were true. And certainly not to a mere detective of Scotland Yard, despite what the writer of this nasty letter thought about him being trusted by Sherlock Holmes. But he could not imagine any circumstance in which Holmes would want the strange picture to be splashed in the newspapers.

"You've been away from London, Mr. Holmes, and perhaps you don't understand the. . . atmosphere in London just now."

Holmes was staring out the window into Baker Street. It didn't take a detective to deduce that he was watching out for Dr. Watson's return.


	3. Hellbender

"Mr. Holmes, you can't be unaware of the Oscar Wilde trial."

"I was aware," Holmes said with the venom that Lestrade had become familiar with. That venom was usually reserved for fools, or criminals that harmed women or children.

"Then you need to know that it's about to take a turn very much for the worse for Mr. Wilde. If the Crown has its way, Wilde will go to prison for gross indecency. Prison, Mr. Holmes. And not only Mr. Wilde. We have all been given a ration of new cases to investigate. It's a witch-hunt. Turns my stomach, it does. And if this drawing gets in the paper, I'm afraid of what may happen to you. And to Dr. Watson. If you aren't going to comply with this person's demands -- "

"Assuredly not."

"-- then I advise you to leave London. Leave England, go to the Continent -- until this --- witch hunt -- passes. They always do. Fashions in prosecution come and go."

"I will not permit anyone or anything to touch the reputation of Dr. Watson. You may take that as you will, Lestrade. Now, you have delivered your message. I thank you for your diligence. However, this is not a matter upon which I require the assistance of Scotland Yard."

"But -- you're being blackmailed, Mr. Holmes!"

"Blackmail!" Holmes sneered. "I do not consider it in that light, Mr. Lestrade.   I cannot see that a picture of myself and Dr. Watson, drawn in the likeness of lizards or some such twaddle, can in any way be damaging to either of us. You were right. It is some sort of obscure prank, and nothing more. Not worthy of your attention and surely not of mine. Thank you again for your trouble but I would ask that you be about your business. As you have reminded me, I have been away from London for too long and must attend to mine."

"Very well," Lestrade said heavily. He was never going to be taken into the confidence of Sherlock Holmes, which had been proven to him many times over. Always left in the dark. He had become the butt of many a joke by other Yarders, mocking him over their pints over his many comical failures as described in Dr. Watson's stories.   "But maybe you can explain why a certain lady of noble title asked for my help this morning. She had a nearly identical drawing. Seems she hoped I might ask the great Sherlock Holmes to consult on the case," he said with as little sarcasm as he could muster.

Holmes poured out a small brandy, and offered one to Lestrade. It was far too early in the day but neither mentioned such proprieties.

"Lestrade, you must tell me who it was."

"If you'll let me help you."

Holmes shook his head. "This is something I must do alone. If you want to help me, give me the name of the man who got the other drawing."

"I didn't say it was a man, I only mentioned a titled lady," Lestrade said. "But you knew that it was about a man anyway."

"The name!"

"Edward Gascoyne, Viscount Halbourne."

There was a silence before Holmes whispered, "Just so."

"Now, can you tell me what this drawing means to you?"

The haunted look in Holmes's eyes made Lestrade almost regret pressing the detective in this way. It was ungentlemanly to a man who he had always admired as one of the most proper, if singular, gentlemen in London.

"We were called the Hellbenders," Holmes said. "It was a club at Cambridge. One of many obscure little cliques of like-minded fellows. I wasn't in the club, really. I suppose one could say I was a sort of auxilliary or unofficial member. Mostly, they wanted me for my knowledge of chemistry. Or so I thought. One of the club's pursuits was, ah, of certain obscure stimulants."

"You said 'we', so I presume you are including Viscount Halbourne?"

"He wasn't a viscount then, but yes. Edward Gascoyne was a Hellbender."

"Does this mean that members of this Hellfire--"

"Hellbender."

"-- Hellbender club are being blackmailed by these filthy drawings? Why?"

"It would appear so. I can think of no other connection between Gascoyne and myself. I have not seen him since Cambridge. I haven't seen. . . any of them."

"Why would someone want to put about pictures of members of this club as some sort of lizard? And why now?"

"The first is easy. The figure is the club's emblem and motto, with a slight but undoubtedly vital alteration. And these figures are not lizards, Lestrade. They are salamanders. Hellbenders are a kind of salamander. Native to North America, I recall, but the men. . . liked the ring of it. Thought it had style. The club's motto was ' _Nutrisco Et Extinguo',_ which translated literally means "I nourish and I extinguish." But this engraving has it as ' _Nutrisco Aut Extinguetur_.' Which is quite different."

"How? It sounds almost the same."

"' _I nourish or I shall be extinguished_.'"

"Extinguished? Like a candle? Mr. Holmes, in plain English, someone is threatening to snuff you out!"

"How colourfully you put it. I only share this little reminiscence of my Cambridge days because I cannot imagine that Edward Gascoyne will not recognize this figure and motto as readily as I do.  So you see -- I haven't disclosed anything you wouldn't have known by the end of the day."

Holmes was reaching for his violin, always a sure sign that an interview with Sherlock Holmes was come to a close.

"If you don't want my help, then, Mr. Holmes -- "

"I do not, except in one particular. Give me your word not to speak of this to Dr. Watson."

"Now, Mr. Holmes, this is police business, and I can't promise --"

"But you must. I've helped you solve many a crime, have I not? Have I ever asked you anything in return other than to allow me to help Scotland Yard to put away criminals who might have otherwise walked free?"

"Very well," Lestrade growled, jamming his hat upon his silvered head, "I give you my word I'll say nothing to Dr. Watson. I'll leave that to you, because if that picture gets in the paper, I wouldn't want to hear what will be said behind your backs. And to your face, too, come to that. I hate to say such a thing to you, Mr. Holmes, and I know it's an infamous lie. It's this Oscar Wilde trial, it's brought all this, ah --" He didn't want to say the awful words, _buggery_ , or worse, _sodomy_ , aloud. "You and Dr. Watson don't deserve to be dragged down into the gutter. Mark my words, I did try to warn you, Mr. Holmes."

"And I have taken careful note of all you have said, Lestrade. You need have no fear on our account. Thank you."

Lestrade left Baker Street to the mournful strains of Holmes's violin. He passed John Watson returning to 221B.   Lestrade steeled himself to be challenged to reveal what had passed between him and Sherlock Holmes, but Dr. Watson merely nodded curtly as he passed.

"There is no 18 1/2 Folgate Street, Holmes! And no one answering to the name of 'Mr. August Belvedere' at Number 17 or Number 18, either."

"My dear fellow! Are you quite sure? I have been deceived, I see. Ah well. Shall we finish breakfast? And yes, 'The Case of the Beheaded Nobleman' will do very well."

Watson was gratified that his soldier's nerves, which were generally still quite steady, prevented him from howling in frustration. Holmes looked damnably insouciant, still in his dressing gown, with the violin tucked under his chin.   He didn't look, for example, as if he and Lestrade had discussed anything momentous. Watson knew this meant that it probably had been something of grave importance, which for some reason Holmes was not prepared to disclose to him at present. This evoked the case of the Hound of the Baskervilles, where Holmes had so abused his trust by concealing from him that he was present in the vicinity of Baskerville Hall and Grimpen rather than away on another case. But he had forgiven Holmes.

He always forgave Holmes.

 


	4. The Rooms at the Savoy

 

Chapter Four.  The Rooms at The Savoy.

 

                   _Far from being ashamed of my crime, I felt that I should like to proclaim it to the world._

                                --- _Teleny_ , attributed to Oscar Wilde

The Savoy Hotel was, it must be said, not the last word in discretion in London.  For discretion, one went to Claridges, or perhaps the Langham.  But for certain "men of affairs," only the Savoy would do, perhaps because discretion was the least of its attractions.  In its own uniquely modern fashion, the Savoy had become London's school for scandal.  In the spring of 1895, fresh from his triumph with The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde had seemed the school's reigning master.  Young men and ladies (and some of indistinguishable natures) swanned about the Savoy, turned out as well as their rough trade allowed, ready for a good time in one of the Savoy's famously luxurious suites --  or if a suite wasn't on offer, any dark corner in the American Bar would do very well.

A somber traveling solicitor, dressed in an out-of-style suit and well-worn but carefully shined boots,  was out of place in the glittering crowd lounging about the Savoy's lobby and therefore attracted no notice but that of the sneering desk clerk as he rented the smallest and least glamorous of the Savoy's rooms.

  The solicitor gravely allowed the one of the hotel boys to take his single case up.

"Shall I unpack for you, sir," the boy offered halfheartedly.  This guest was clearly a cut below.  He gave a near-sneer at the man's quaint overcoat. 

"Don't trouble yourself," the man said.  He had an odd accent.  The boy wondered if it was French.  He had heard stories about French gentlemen.  If there was money in it, all the better.  He waited.

"Do you know a maid here named Jane Cotta?"

The boy frowned.  "Here, now, gov'nr, Jane ain't that kind."

The man folded his arms.  He was very tall.  His eyes seemed to pierce him and the boy felt ashamed, because there was something about his bearing that made him think him a gentleman after all.

"I merely wish to speak to her on a matter of private business, to her advantage.  Is Jane here?"

 "What 'bout my advantage, sir?" The boy was sharp.  Coins were produced and passed smoothly into his pocket.  "Thankee, sir.  Jane is upstairs, but if you care to wait I'll send her down."

"Very good."

Sherlock Holmes spent the minutes waiting in studying a document drawn up in careful law-hand.  The ink was very fresh.   He shook his head over it and ran his hands through his hair distractedly.

Jane Cotta was a short, dark woman with a severe face and rough hands that she wiped on her apron. She hesitantly shook Holmes's extended hand.

It was difficult to imagine a more upright specimen of a working maid. Holmes's heart sank.

"Jamie said you had a matter of business for me.  'To my advantage,'  Jamie said," she said abruptly. "I was that surprised.  I'm a busy woman and have my duties to be about.  And I don't hold with no funny business, though I must say you seem respectable enough.  Sir."

"Respectable enough is high praise from you, I imagine.   I do not intend to cause you any harm, and am here to prevent a harm to another, if I can.  I shall come to the point, which I do believe will be to your advantage. Pray sit," he invited the woman to sit in the brocade armchair by the fire.  She looked scandalised.

"No thank you, sir."

"Very well." He handed her the document.   "This paper has your name written there, at the bottom.  First, did you sign a document like this?"

Mrs. Cotta's eyes widened.  "Where did you get that?"

"I should think it obvious.  Please answer my question."

"And why should I?"  She took a step back toward the door.

"I said it would be to your advantage.  What I did not mention was that it might be very much otherwise if you do not.  I see by the mark on your cuffs that you have just now been administering Vin Mariani to someone, and that person was not yourself.  If you were drinking it yourself, the stain would be on your collar or front.  You have been dosing the Vin Mariani by hand to a person who was very sloppy in taking the cup, and it splashed there on your cuffs."

"I don't know what you mean by 'Vin Mariani.'  This is the Savoy, sir.  Wine is like water here.  Not an hour goes by someone doesn't ask for wine be brought up, and I'm forever clearing away the leavings."

 "No doubt, but that stain is not ordinary red wine, and it is not the place of a chambermaid at the Savoy to serve wine.  It is, as I said, very fresh, and it is assuredly Vin Mariani, which bears a peculiar odor, readily detectible to one who is familiar with it.  It is the essence of the coca plant.  Specifically, cocaine at 6 milligrams to the ounce.  Don't trouble to deny it, Mrs. Cotta.  Some ignorant, some might say even say grossly neglectful persons might give a small glass to children.  To keep them hard at work when they should by rights be in school or at play, I imagine.  A child that is being kept hidden in the precincts of this very hotel, given the freshness of the stain which I see has not yet set.  Not to mention the faint small handprint in soot on your apron about the level of your knee."

The woman's face crumpled and she sank into the chair by the fireside.  After a heavy sigh, she looked up with fear in her eyes, but determination as well.  Holmes assessed her as a strong woman who had been put in a predicament, and would have been inclined almost to pity her.  Except for the child's handprint and the sharp scent of cocaine diluted in wine.

"I did sign a paper.  It looked just like that one.  It only said what I saw with my own eyes.  That there was a boy.   In Mr. Oscar Wilde's suite.  Sleeping in his bed.  Mr. Wilde had been there a month, ran up a bill as if he was King Midas.  He was told not to come back."

Holmes's mouth drew up into a thin, cruel sort of smile.  "You have gone into quite explicit detail as to the condition of the sheets in that gentleman's bed in this document. That there were "peculiar stains" of a very particular nature.  Are you quite certain that the facts are as stated here?"

Jane Cotta coloured but stood her ground.  "I'm no finicking miss.  A maid sees everything, and I mean everything, in the Savoy.  I've seen many an odd thing in the bedsheets here, things you maybe couldn't imagine, as you seem to be from the country, sir.   When I say that Mr Wilde's sheets were peculiarly stained with Vaseline, with -- well, it is just as it says there.  I saw with my own eyes."

"Men's issue? Semen?"

"Yes, sir.  Nothing unusual in that either, I can tell you.  Nothing I've not seen before in the sheets."

"And the, ah, soil?"  This single fact was the most damning.  It meant that they intended to prove that the crime of sodomy had been committed. 

A crime that carried a prison sentence of ten years.

"I didn't make it up.  Why would I?   They had left smears of shit in the sheets.  His, or the boy's. Or both." Jane Cotta's voice fairly dripped with disgust.  "The sheets were in such a state as I had to ask the housekeeper how I was expected to clean them."

Holmes was silent for a moment.  "I am astonished you didn't throw them away.  Or burn them."

"Oh, no sir. The Savoy's sheets as good as the Queen's.  They would likely take it out of my wages, sir, if I wasn't able to save a soiled sheet.  That's the truth."

"And you are quite sure it was Mr. Oscar Wilde who had been sleeping in that bed?  Did you see him in bed with this boy?"

"Well - he -- let me see. . .  this was two years ago, sir."  The sidelong slide of her glance toward the door was an unmistakable sign that the woman knew more than she had said in the affidavit.  But what?

"And yet you have just sworn out this affidavit that Mr. Wilde was there."

"This doesn't seem much to be to my advantage at all, sir, begging your pardon.  I'll be taking my leave."

She was about to flee the room, but Holmes shot out,

"Shall I ring for the housekeeper, then? Perhaps she might like to know you've had your child hidden about the hotel, and are dosing the child up with Vin Mariani pilfered from the hotel's own stock."

Her hand froze on the doorknob.

"Or, you can show me up to Mr. Wilde's room, where you say you saw the boy sleeping.  And I won't say a word to the housekeeper about your secret."

"Who are you?  And why do you care about what I said in that paper?  I swear what is written there is the truth."

Holmes folded his arms.  "Who am I?  I am a person who cares very much about finding out the truth.  If what you say is true, I will trouble you no further."

# # #

Room 362 was a suite with a sitting room and bedroom, furnished in opulent style with overstuffed chairs, polished wood, and gleaming mirrors.  The marble fireplace was unlit, the room chilly.  Holmes indeed considered the rooms, for all their elegance, to be far less comfortable than his own. He was distracted by a momentary wish that he were at home in the snug confines of 221b, with his pipe and perhaps a small whisky.  And Watson.

"How was it that you are so certain of the date that you saw the boy in this room?"

Jane Cotta looked smug and somewhat relieved.  This was a point upon which she was quite certain.  "It was the day after were reopened the third floor after the spring cleaning.  We had it in the books.  That's why I remembered so well.  The rooms, and of course the sheets, were ever so spotless on that day."

"It says here that Mr. Wilde rang for you to light the fire."

"He did.  It was early.  About 8:00 in the morning.  Not many guests are awake at that hour.  Mr. Wilde was wearing his dressing gown.  He was writing something, I believe.  When I went to light the fire, I could see the boy in the bed."

Holmes saw that there was indeed a clear view from the sitting room to the bed, if the door to the bedroom was open.

"Why do you say 'boy'?  How do you know what age he was?"

"I could see his face plain enough."

"The early morning sun in March is not usually bright," Holmes observed.

"It wasn't from the sunlight.  The curtains were drawn.  But I did quietly step into the bedroom, just to take up clothes that were dropped at the foot of the bed.   That is how I saw his face."

"You haven't answered my question.  How old do you say the boy was?" 

"Lad was about fourteen.  I'd say he was a country lad.  We have a deal of boys working in the hotel of about that age.  And I remember what my own brother was like at that age."

Holmes entered the bedroom, and touched the coverlet with his fingertip.   There was a hot, sour feeling in the centre of his chest.

"Fourteen,"  he repeated dully.

 "Cheeks near as smooth as a girl's.   And it wasn't the first boy as was seen in Mr. Wilde's company at the Savoy, from what I heard."

Holmes swallowed hard.  He gave Jane Cotta a pound for her trouble and was about to go when he noticed the gleaming door handle set into the paneling of the sitting room wall, in fact a door.

"Does this door open to the next room?" He touched the handle.

"Don't, sir! The room has a guest.  But if a husband and wife wanted to take both rooms, that door can be unlocked so as they can pass between."

Holmes turned on Mrs Cotta.  "Not only husband and wife.  Did Mr. Wilde have a companion who had taken this adjoining room on the occasion when you say you saw the boy?"

Jane Cotta's eyes narrowed and her calculating look said all.  "You'll have no more out of me, sir.  I saw what I saw."

Holmes advanced on Mrs. Cotta with an accusatory stare.  "The room next door was let by Lord Alfred Douglas, was it not?  Come now, I can easily find out."

"What if it was?"  The maid's stare back was beginning to waver.  The gentleman who had procured her signature on the affidavit had terrified her.  But this man was beginning to frighten her even more, although she could not have said exactly why.  She was almost certain what she had signed was nothing but the truth.  Mostly the truth, anyway, so far as she could remember two years on.

 With help from the Marquess of Queensberry.

The man was doing something with his hands about the door handle and then with a soft snick she was amazed to see the door to Room 361 glide open on its well-oiled hinges.  She put her hand over her mouth to stifle her gasp.  They would think she and this strange man were thieves and she would be sacked.

Thankfully, the room was empty.  Holmes examined the furnishings, and paced between the sitting room and the bedroom.  He inspected the hotel's stationery in a neat box on the writing desk under the window, and looked out over the Thames.  Then he took a sheet and made out a little sketch of the room.

"Have the rooms been refurnished since the morning that you say you saw the boy?"

"No, sir."

"The furnishings are just as they were?"

"Yes, sir.  I clean these rooms every day.  I should know."

Holmes smiled grimly.  "Indeed you should know.  There is no writing desk in Room 362, and yet you say that you saw Mr. Wilde writing when you entered to light the fire.  There is, however, a writing desk in this room."

The maid blanched.  This was just the matter that the horrid Marquess of Queensberry had harangued her about until her head spun. 

"I suppose--" she began, then stopped.  The old Marquess and his lawyer had impressed upon her very strongly that in signing that affidavit, she had sworn before God and the Queen that it was true, "under penalty of perjury," which meant she would be sent down to prison if anybody found out it was not the truth.  "I suppose they may have moved that desk and I forgot, sir," she ventured gamely.

"Did you see Lord Douglas in his room that morning? Was this door open between the rooms?"

"I don't remember."

Holmes shook his head.  "It won't do.  Your memory on all other points seems remarkably fresh after two years.  It simply won't do, Mrs. Cotta.  You must come with me and swear out a true affidavit, this time leaving nothing out."

At this, Mrs. Cotta, overwhelmed at last, shook her head violently, twisting her apron and weeping quietly.

"I can't."

"Why not?  Has someone threatened you? The Marquess of Queensberry? Did he do anything to prevent you from telling the complete truth in this document?"

She took a few shaky gulps and wiped at her tears.  "Leave off, sir.   I can't say more.  I did tell the truth," she repeated as if to assure herself.  "I did tell the truth."

Holmes looked very sternly down at her but said no more.  If he made any additional threats, the woman would likely flee right back to Queensberry.

He carefully folded his sketch of the room into his pocket, and left Mrs. Cotta to her tears.

# # #

Holmes's business being finished, he carefully adjusted his attire and balanced false spectacles on his nose before returning downstairs to check out of his room, prepared to make an excuse of unexpected business of an urgent nature for not staying in his room overnight.  Before he could do so, a liveried boy approached and handed him a note.

"If you please sir, the gentleman asked me to give this to you."

He unfolded the note.  It said,  "Meet me in the American Bar to discuss our mutual interest."

"Who sent this?"

"Military gentleman, sir.  He is at the bar now, sir." 

Holmes tipped the boy, noticing with a grimace that he was possibly about fourteen.

There was a man at the bar dressed in what Holmes readily recognized as an Army officer's uniform, with a close-fitting red coat, brass buttons and gold eupalets.  He had a tall glass before him filled with an iced drink, from which he had just taken a sip.  He looked at Holmes over the rim of the glass with a bold stare.  He had a full mouth, a fresh complexion, and an overall louche appearance notwithstanding his uniform. 

Holmes decided it was a disguise.  As he himself was in disguise, he wondered how he had been noticed at all.  In his guise as a traveling solicitor, he knew no one in London.  Balance of probabilities, he had been followed to the Savoy from Baker Street.  He could well imagine who might have had him followed and cursed himself for not taking the well-used precaution of taking the train out of London and returning again, to prevent just such an occurrence. 

"To what do I owe the pleasure, ah, Captain ---"

"Captain Hobbs, sir.  Fancy a drink?"

Holmes declined but the barman produced one anyway at a gesture from 'Captain Hobbs'.   Holmes examined the drink, pale liquid on ice.  He raised it to his nose.  The American Bar was rather new.  It was called "American" because it served the mixed drinks from America, called "cocktails". 

"Gin, sugar syrup, water, and a dash of nutmeg," he pronounced.  He did not drink.

The barman grinned.  "You are correct, sir.  A gin sling."

"I've been told you can mix better than this," Captain Hobbs said, leaning in confidentially.  Too close.  Holmes drew back, more in surprise than from the impropriety of the man's conduct.  He was, or appeared to be, more than a little drunk.  His lips shone with moisture and he smelled of an expensive, slightly sweet cologne that Holmes placed as being from a very particular shop.

"You are mistaken.  I am a solicitor.   Unless the matter you mention in your note is legal business, I must take my leave."

Hobbs put his hand on Holmes's arm to restrain him.  "Now don't be coy.  Why don't we go back to your room and discuss it in private."

Holmes carefully pulled his arm away, but Hobbs abruptly threw his arm around Holmes's shoulder with a suggestive squeeze.  Men at the bar were already glancing their way and muttering.  Holmes's keen hearing did not fail him and he knew what they were saying.

He kicked Hobb's leg from under him.  Hobbs fell back against the bar and immediately launched back with a surprisingly powerful punch.  Holmes was ready with a deft parry and a counterpunch of his own that made a satisfying crunch against the man's cheekbone.  From the corner of his eye he saw a huge man in tweeds, no doubt the hotel's security man, and calculated whether he could escape by the door he had spied behind the bar. 

But it was too late.  The hulking man waded into the crowd that had materialised around Holmes and Hobbs, and in pulling them apart somehow entangled his stoutly booted feet amongst their own, toppling Holmes and Hobbs with a crash of broken glass.  His false spectacles went flying. Spilled gin slings drenched Holmes's coat. 

Undeterred, Hobbs insinuated himself far too closely against Holmes's prone body, whispering in his ear, "You should have done as you were told."

Before Holmes could make up his mind whether to finish Hobbs off or make an escape without further exposing himself to such unseemly notice, a familiar voice cut through the crowd.  Shards of ice, colder than the iced cocktail, pierced his innards.

"What in God's name is going on here?"  Watson cried.

A man said, "Lover's quarrel!" with an ugly laugh that was joined in by Hobbs himself, to Holmes's utter horror.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Details of the testimony of the Savoy chambermaid Jane Cotta concerning the state of the bedsheets and the boy in the bed as stated in this chapter are reported in "The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde", Neil McKenna (Basic Books 2004). Mr. McKenna had access to Mrs. Cotta's 1895 statement which is in a private collection. Her testimony is also recorded in The Trials of Oscar Wilde, Ed. H. Montgomery Hyde (1949). 
> 
> I have invented some additional details for the sake of the story.


	5. An Investigation Of Matters Of The Most Appalling Character

**Ghosts and Shadows Chapter Five: An Investigation of Matters of the Most Appalling Character**

" _And the position we stood in was this: that, without expecting a verdict in this case, we should be going through, day after day, an investigation of matters of the most appalling character_."

\-- Sir Edward Clark, attorney for Oscar Wilde, withdrawing Wilde's prosection for libel against the Marquess of Queensberry.

Watson caught it all in a glance, a man in an irregular-looking Army officer’s uniform pressing himself against Holmes’s lean form as they sprawled on the floor, Holmes’s countenance, pale with anger, the man’s vulgar laugh joining in with other laughs and murmurings. Watson gripped a handful of coat and wrenched the larger man up as though he were as light as a doll. Then he delivered a hard punch to the man’s jaw with an audible crack and rattle.

Holmes was instantly on his feet and planted himself firmly between Watson and Hobbs.

“How dare you, sir,” Watson said through gritted teeth. But Holmes, without attempting to restrain him, was giving him such a look as Watson could not but understand he wanted him to leave well alone. Hobbs, undeterred, hovered close with a clenched fist and a leer. Watson wound his arm for another go to wipe it off.

"Gentlemen! There'll be no brawling here! Out with all of you, smart-like,” the Savoy’s security man hissed. Their opportunity to leave without further notice was spoiled. Holmes bent and retrieved his spectacles, straightened them fussily and replaced them on his nose, then dabbed his old-fashioned traveling suit with a napkin from the table in an attempt to repair the damp spots, the perfect picture of a confused country solicitor who had been caught up for reasons beyond his ken in a brawl in a strange bar in the great city, into which he had perhaps stumbled quite by accident.

The security man relentlessly ushered them out of the American Bar with arms as thick as hams. But they were obstructed by a small crowd of men in evening dress following a towering man with leonine features, hair swept back from his noble forehead, reciting what seemed to be lines from a play. One of the passing crowd was a red-headed man with a thick, well-trimmed beard and piercing eyes who turned his gaze upon Hobbs in a manner that caught Holmes’s attention. Then they were unceremoniously ejected onto the pavement, passing from the brilliant gaslight of the Savoy to the dark street. Hobbs immediately darted through the crowd and was gone.

The security man shook a meaty finger at Holmes and Watson. “I dunno what that were about and I don’t partic-larly care. No brawling and no gentlemen on the make in this house. This is The Savoy, not The Ten Bells nor a bath-house neither. I don’t want to see neither of you gents in my establishment again. Do I make meself plain?”

Holmes limited himself to a terse “Quite,” with a restraining gesture to Watson, and turned on his heel the opposite direction down the Strand as Hobbs had done.

The evening was uncommonly fine. They fell into their accustomed easy pace. They were almost immediately at the doors of Simpson’s, which was in the same block as The Savoy. Simpson’s was perhaps one of their favourite restaurants. They had dined so well there only a week since, where gentlemen might pay their half crown and sit as long as they liked over their well-cooked meal delivered by silver-domed trolleys that gilded by at silent intervals to offer seconds, thirds, or in fact as much as a man might have an appetite for which was, as Watson had often observed, quite ludicrous in Holmes’s case as he ate scantily enough and it was up to him to make up the difference, and no one minded if the gentlemen had come fresh off the streets from a case and hadn’t dressed for dinner. But a regretful slight shake of the head meant that Holmes didn’t want to be seen in Simpson’s tonight. Watson was full of questions but the look on Holmes’s face as he glanced up made him hold his tongue. They walked on.

Watson was irritated by throbbing in his hand where he had struck Hobb’s too-solid jaw and thrust it in his pocket.

"Some ice for your hand, Watson, would be just the thing.”

Watson snorted. Holmes’s fund of arrogance was endless. “I am a doctor, Holmes.”

"It is unfortunate that we were ejected from the American Bar. They keep a deal of ice on hand for those abominable cocktails. But here we are. This will do.”

Watson protested that his hand was perfectly fine, but they were soon installed in a quiet booth at the back of Marquand’s, rival dining establishment to Simpson’s that they had tried once and vowed never to visit again on grounds of loyalty, habit, and the superiority of Simpson’s peerless beef.

"Champagne on ice, oysters, and two whiskies,” Holmes ordered.

The items being produced, Holmes carelessly withdrew the champagne bottle and pushed the silver ice bucket toward Watson. He leaned back and folded his arms until Watson plunged his hand with a resigned sigh into the ice.

"I look like a fool. And how am I expected to eat oysters with my hand in an ice bucket?”

Holmes looked unaccountably discomfited.

"Never mind. I can drink whisky left-handed at any rate.”

Watson knocked the whisky at one brisk gulp and regarded Holmes seriously.

"All right. If you’re trying to distract me, or throw me off the scent of whatever it is you’re doing, you’re not exactly up to your usual standard. You know you don't even drink champagne.”

"Of course not. I am merely passing the time. We might start by you telling me how it was that you came to be in the American Bar this evening. I imagine that someone told you to meet me there.”

"Someone!” Watson withdrew his hand from the ice and wiped the moisture with a napkin. He flexed his fingers. His hand was respectably numb from the ice and the pleasant effects of the whisky. But it did nothing to soothe the ill feeling in his chest. He clenched his chilly fist and thumped it on the table. “Someone!”

He was fairly roaring and Holmes put a finger to his own lips to indicate he should lower his tone. Watson leaned across the table pugnaciously. “Someone! You know very well that you yourself told me to meet you there, Holmes. I have your note in my pocket. Why are you playing these games with me, of all people, Holmes? First, that little matter of August Belvedere at 18 ½ Folgate Street and now this.”

Holmes finally removed his false spectacles and leaned back. In the dim light of the paneled booth, Holmes’s eyes gleamed. He pushed the second whisky across the table toward his companion. Watson raised an eyebrow at this, but took it.

"You recall a particular note I had yesterday.”

"From the Marquis of Queensberry? About Oscar Wilde? Of course I remember. He said he would call at Baker Street. Did you meet with him after all?”

"No. I sent word that I begged to be excused from meeting him, as I had been called out of London urgently on a case that I expected would occupy me for some time.”

"In that case, why did you ask me to meet you at the American Bar in the Savoy, Holmes?”

"I did not. Let me examine the note you say I sent.”

Watson produced the note, and Holmes examined it minutely, holding it close to the candle. “I don’t blame you for being taken in, Watson. It is exceedingly well done. But it is a forgery. And a bold one.”

Watson shook his head in irritation. “I fail to see why anyone would go to the trouble to forge a note in your hand, just so I would see you in the American Bar. Or anywhere, for that matter. What does it matter?”

Holmes looked quietly at Watson for a moment. Watson looked back, puzzled.

"I know that you fail to see it, but I see it. Now, Watson, you no doubt have been reading the papers since our return. You know about this business of Oscar Wilde suing the Marquess of Queensberry for libel.”

"I have. Queensberry left a card addressed to Wilde at his club, calling him a ‘sodomite,’ for God’s sake. He was infuriated by his son Lord Alfred Douglas’s close association with Wilde.” Watson took a drink from the whisky and held it in his hand. “I thought that Mr. Wilde did what any gentleman would have been forced to do, in the circumstances. At any rate, that is what I thought at first. As you say, I have read the papers now.”

"In fact, Queensberry– being either somewhat illiterate in the manner of a certain type of old Irish nobility, or being extremely clever– actually wrote: _'to Oscar Wilde, posing as Somdomite.’_ You will have read, then, that Wilde consented yesterday to a verdict in favor of Queensberry, as to having 'posed as a sodomite’ in respect to inferences that could be drawn from The Picture of Dorian Gray. As you may know, Watson, it is a complete defence in a libel case that the matter is, in fact, the truth.”

Watson drew a folded newspaper from his coat. It had an engraved picture of Queensberry’s defense lawyer, Edward Carson, examining Oscar Wilde on the witness stand. He read aloud:

_Mr. Carson [quoting Mr. Wilde’s infamous novel The Picture of Dorian Gray]: 'People talk of secret vices… Why is it that so many gentlemen in London will neither go to your house nor invite you to theirs? …Why is your friendship so fateful to young men? Dorian, Dorian, your reputation is infamous… ’ [to Mr. Wilde] Does not this passage suggest a charge of unnatural vice?”_

_Mr. Wilde: “It describes Dorian Gray as a man of very corrupt influence, although there is no statement as to the nature of the influence.”_

Watson looked up sharply. “The papers say that there was to be evidence was that Wilde had given large sums of money to, ah, young men. Fine clothes, too. And that he met these young men at The Savoy, Holmes.”

He looked at Holmes steadily, letting him know that it hadn’t escaped even his slower wits that the American Bar was in The Savoy.

Holmes steepled his fingertips under his chin. “That is the allegation. Queensberry told the court that he was prepared to put those young men on the witness stand to prove that at Wilde is, in fact – well, what he had alleged. I cannot abide that word, with its flavour of the Old Testament. Well. I have it on good authority that the court consented– whether out of pity or ignorance, I have not yet determined in my own mind – to a recess, which gave Wilde a brief chance to flee London by the last boat train to the continent. And that Mr. Wilde has refused to go. It is certain that he will have been served with a criminal warrant for acts of gross indecency in connection with his intimacy, of whatever degree, with these young men. He could serve ten years in prison, Watson.”

"Queensberry said in his note that wanted your help to find witnesses against Mr. Wilde.”

"And you know that I refused. If for no other reason but that Mr. Wilde has been my client, as you well know. It is dishonourable to take part against a client, unless for compelling reason. Queensberry’s request signals to me that he is not so sure of the quality of his witnesses. I know well the other private detectives whom he has employed to stir up evidence against Wilde. I say in truth that they are not in my league – ”

Watson smirked to indicate that he would never believe Holmes if he attempted to put on airs of modesty.

"--but I allow that they are not entirely without some resources amongst, shall we say, certain of London’s less genteel classes. Not to match my own, but perhaps sufficient for the purpose. Perhaps.”

They sat in silence for a moment, the convivial, raucous noise of the other diners seeming to mock the folly of Oscar Wilde.

"Someone,” Watson finally said, “wanted me to see you in the American Bar. At The Savoy. With that – man.”

"Yes. Someone did.”

He refused to ask if Holmes knew the man. It seemed impossible. "You do know, Holmes, that man’s uniform was false? It must have been a theatrical costume.”

Holmes gave a courtly gesture of homage, like a short bow, across the table. “Well spotted, old fellow. I confess that the false spectacles prevented me from observing this until it was too late. Most regrettable. I shall have make an adjustment to my disguise in future. And no. I never met the man before."

Watson revisited the scene in his mind, the tall, well-built false Army captain, writhing against Holmes on the floor. The satisfying crunch of his fist against the man’s jaw. The man had laughed that ugly laugh but hadn’t said a word. He hoped he had dislocated it. All the men standing around them, laughing. He didn’t think he would ever forget it. With fresh ink from the newspaper reporting Oscar Wilde’s disgrace smudging his fingertips, he felt somehow dirtied by the entire affair, although he was loathe to dwell on such things.

Still, he needed to know what it was all about. His friendship with the great detective had given him a relentless curiousity perhaps to rival Holmes’s own.

"Now Holmes. Are you going to tell me why? Why did someone want me to see you there? Like – well, like that.”

Holmes’s brief smile was melancholy, with nothing of happiness in it. It was the sort of smile that Watson saw play across Holmes’s lips far too often, especially of late.

"It cannot be for any reason that bodes well for you. Or for me. That is all I am prepared to say on the matter until I can find out more.”

Watson thought perhaps that Holmes intended this to be his last word on the subject, which in most circumstances would suffice. He had nothing but the highest respect for his companion’s intellect and resourcefulness. But tonight, it wouldn’t wash.

"What will we do next? To find out more, I mean.”

Holmes reached for the champagne and to Watson’s surprise, uncorked it. A waiter appeared and poured out their glasses.

"We? We shall do nothing at all. You are returning home this evening, where I think you will find that Mary has returned from her visit to her cousin and is anxious to be reunited her husband, and tomorrow morning you will return to the demands of your patients. I, however, as you have intuited, have taken on a new case that will take me out of London and indeed, very probably to the continent, or even farther abroad. I cannot say. I expect I shall be away for some time. A toast, Watson, to your domestic happiness and the prosperity of your medical practice. And try the oysters, do, old fellow, your hand seems quite better.”

Watson’s right hand was clenching and unclenching in a manner over which he had no control, to his frustration and shame. Holmes was usually too considerate of Watson’s feelings regarding this occasional symptom of nerves, as he had once tersely admitted, from his time in Afghanistan. Then he took up the glass of champagne, as did Holmes with a graceful gesture for a toast. Watson deliberately did not join in the toast, but drained his glass, and then poured himself another. He had a tremendous head for spirits and only Holmes, perhaps, would have noticed the unusual flush in his cheeks and fire in his eye.

"Mary will do very well without me for a while longer. She can go off at a moment’s notice without a by-your-leave, and therefore, by God, so can I. My domestic happiness, as you say, is no concern of yours, Holmes. And my patients, what few there are, will no doubt continue to survive without me.”

Holmes looked as if he had expected this answer. Watson was dismayed to see that it gave him no pleasure and felt stung that he was evidently not wanted.

"This case, Watson, will be in many ways the most serious I have ever embarked upon, and with grave risk to you. And to your-- reputation, it pains me to say. I take little account of my own safety but I admit it will also be dangerous to me. Very dangerous. I would do anything in my power to spare you, Watson. And so, I am asking you to leave it to me, and go home. As you are my dear friend, as I assure you I am to you, I am asking this.”

It was possibly the most frank confession of feeling that Holmes had ever made, and the seriousness of his expression left no doubt of the gravity of the matter, whatever it was. A feeling not unlike that he had felt in battle, with the screams and explosion of cannon and the smell of gunpowder, that no matter what, he would not be defeated, that he would survive, swelled in his breast. Not this time for himself alone, but now for Holmes too, for him and Holmes, together.

“And as I am your most devoted friend, Holmes, I say I will not. I’m coming with you. If you can’t, or won’t, tell me what this is about, I am prepared to wait until you see fit to take me into your confidence. But until then, I’m staying with you. As for my own reputation, I count it little next to yours and if you risk your own, I cannot do less. And if you won’t tell me where you are going next, then I shall tell you where we are going next.”

Holmes sighed deeply and turned his head away. Watson was unable to avoid admiring his profile in the candlelight and for a moment thought Holmes might be hiding an excess of emotion. His heart skipped a beat. But a waiter suddenly emerged from a green baize-covered door and he realised that Holmes must be assessing his possible route of escape, even now.

"If you try to dodge me, which would be a low trick, I swear I will follow, regardless.”

At this, Holmes took up his champagne again and to Watson’s surprise, drained it with a slight grimace. Holmes was not fond of champagne. Apparently they were in for a rare bout of drinking. Watson was in the drinking mood and so he raised his glass too, this time willingly.

"I know from long experience that you are not to be dissuaded when you have made your mind up, Watson,” Holmes said at last, his voice low and thick with some emotion after all, Watson thought. “Very well. And where is it that you think we ought to be going next?”

"Back to Baker Street, where I can retrieve my revolver and pack my bag. And then I am at your disposal, Holmes.”

"An excellent plan. However, we shall have to defer returning to Baker Street. I do not anticipate that we will require your revolver tonight, at any rate. We have to pay a call.”

"A call! So late? It’s nearly eleven o'clock.”

"Indeed. It was necessary to wait until the gentleman in question returned home. He should be home by now. Finish your oysters, Watson.”

Watson complied. He really did like oysters and champagne on occasion, although he would not have judged tonight’s proceedings to have been such an occasion.

They went out into the street, Holmes pausing in the shadow of the vestibule of the restaurant and looking up and down. The Strand was still lively with patrons of nearby theatres strolling in the fine evening air and in and out of the many fashionable restaurants and public houses. Satisfied that they were not watched, Holmes hailed a cab.

"Where to, gentlemen?”

"Chelsea. Number Seventeen, St. Leonard’s Terrace.”

"And who are we calling upon in St. Leonard’s Terrace?”

"You yourself have put your finger on it already. You mentioned the subject this very this evening.”

"I, Holmes? We discussed Mr. Wilde – you don’t mean to call upon Wilde?” He tried to keep the dismay from his tone. There were probably no respectable persons in London, probably not even Wilde’s own wife, who would call upon Oscar Wilde on this night of all nights, with the charge of acts of gross indecency with men hanging over his head. “If you think it right to do so, of course we shall go. I said I would come with you, and I will. But the reporters will be hanging outside his door. There can be no question of secrecy. Perhaps your disguise will serve, Holmes, but I will be recognised myself, and then the game will be up.”

"No, Watson. Even I cannot help Mr. Wilde tonight, I fear. No, I meant a gentleman of the theatre. We are paying a call upon Mr. Bram Stoker.”


	6. Uncanny Things

Black clouds were gathering and a cold wind blew up from the Thames. Watson longed for their fire and for bed, but Holmes was in one of his keen, indefagitable moods. The lamps were still lit at Number 17, St. Leonard's Terrace, shining dully through wisps of fog. As Holmes rang the bell there was a short murmer of a feminine voice from somewhere behind the door. However, the door opened to reveal a tall, bluff-looking man with silver hair and moustaches, resplendent in spotless evening dress. He looked Holmes and Watson over with apparent amusement at their relatively shabby appearance.

"If you're here for Mrs. Stoker's little salon, gentlemen, she's not receiving tonight," he said. "And entre-nous, you wouldn't get past the door. Evening dress only. Quite right, too." He planted a black top hat on his head and tapped his long, silver-tipped walking stick on the doorstep, looking down at them with every appearance of belief that Holmes and Watson should retreat.

"Mr. Gilbert, I believe?" Watson made a short bow. "An honour, sir. I very much admire your operettas with Mr. Sullivan."

Mr. W.S. Gilbert nodded somewhat irritably. His relations with his great collaborator had never recovered from the notorious "carpet quarrel" over charges to their partnership for, among other extravagances, a new carpet for the lobby of the Savoy Theatre. Still, vain as any other impresario, he warmed to the compliment.

"Do you, now? Very kind. Which is your favourite, sir?"

Watson ignored Holmes's increasingly apparent restlessness. "Hard pressed to choose, but I would say 'Ruddigore.' 'When the night wind howls' left quite an impression."

Gilbert beamed and Watson applied his elbow to Holmes's ribs before he could actually snort his contempt. "You and I are in agreement. 'The Yeoman of the Guard,' 'Utopia, Limited' and 'Ruddigore' are my own favoured children. Sir, we have not been introduced, but I feel we have met before. Perhaps at the theatre?"

"Doctor John Watson. May I also present Mr. Sherlock Holmes."

"Ah! You are a writer too, Doctor Watson. I recognized you from your pictures in the Strand. I have often considered that your stories would make admirable operettas in the gothic vein. The public's taste for comedy is changing," Gilbert said with a sigh. "Now then. It's Bram -- not Florrie that you're wanting?" He looked at Holmes narrowly, as if it had suddenly dawned that the famous detective might have business with the mistress of the house. "Well, is it? Because she's not to be disturbed. Not on any account. Most especially, not tonight."

Gilbert leaned more heavily on his cane as though standing were painful, and Watson detected the telltale signs of gout. But the man continued determinedly at his post, barring their entry into the Stoker household.

Watson was mystified but Holmes took this challenge with grave attention.

"We would be delighted to join Mrs. Stoker's salon on another occasion, but as you observe, our business is with Mr. Stoker. We have no desire to disturb that lady, particularly tonight. Is there someone who can announce us?"

"Hmmmph."

At length a maid was called, cards sent up, and they were directed to go up. Gilbert watched them go. Swirling fog enveloped him as he allowed himself to be helped into his carriage, softly singing under his breath: " _When the night wind howls in the chimney cowls, and the bat in the moonlight flies, and the inky clouds like funeral shrouds sail over the midnight skies._ . . "

  
# # #

They entered what was obviously Stoker's study. Every inch of wall space was occupied by bookshelves and numerous framed playbills for Lyceum Theatre, of which Bram Stoker was the business manager. The Lyceum's star, the great actor Henry Irving, with his famed aquiline profile and luxuriant mane, looked down with tragic hauteur upon the room's occupant, no matter the vantage point. Watson recognised the image as the very man they had seen in the Savoy earlier that night, declaiming what must have been a speech from a play.

Two men stood on either side of the snug fireplace. The half-drunk glasses of whisky close at hand to two chairs, drawn close together by the fire, told all. Watson thought Holmes might almost have twitched a slight smile, but it was gone in an instant. He thought he recognised one of the men from the Savoy as well - tall, with reddish hair and close-trimed beard.

"I hope you will forgive the lateness of the hour, Mr. Stoker," Holmes said, with that perfect warmth of good fellowship of which he was capable at surprising times. "This is my friend and colleague, Doctor Watson."

"Not at all, Mr. Holmes. Allow me to introduce my friend, Mr. Hall Caine. He also is a writer, you will no doubt have heard of him, as everyone in London must have with his recent success. But we both admire your accounts of your adventures, Doctor Watson."

"We do indeed," said the other man. Hall Caine was a short, slightly built man with rather wild dark red hair like a halo around his head, and dark eyes that were remarkable for their luminous, piercing quality. Watson thought it could be quite a study as between Caine and Holmes in that respect, and watched with some interest as Holmes examined Caine with focused concentration.

Caine burst out laughing, a high, good-humoured, but rather sly sound. "Mr. Holmes! I do believe you are trying to deduce me."

Stoker froze perceptibly, his eyes darting from Watson to Holmes to Caine, and back again.

"An unshakeable habit of mine," Holmes agreed drily. "I beg your pardon." He did not offer to share his deductions, whatever they were, and neither Caine nor Stoker seemed inclined to draw him out, although Caine did not appear to mind Holmes's scrutiny in the least.

Everyone found a comfortable seat. Stoker poured them whiskys. Watson's eye was drawn by the hastily-stacked manuscript covered with what looked to be an illegible hand on a nearby table. Stoker watched Holmes over his glass.

"To what do I owe the honour of your visit, Mr. Holmes? I fortunately have not had any further difficulty in that little matter in which you were so, ah, helpful last year."

Watson thought Stoker's tone a little cool. Despite the pleasantries, he was beginning to feel distinctly unwelcome.

"You observed a certain individual wearing an Army captain's uniform in the lobby of the Savoy earlier tonight. You recognised him, I believe."

Stoker poured himself another glass. If his hand shook, he concealed it well. "I don't like to contradict the notorious powers of observation of Sherlock Holmes, but I don't know the man. It was the uniform, you see."

Sherlock threw a sidelong glance at Watson. "Indeed?"

"It was a costume. One of mine. From the Lyceum. I presume it was stolen, but it is possible that it was lent out to another company, although I don't recall such a request crossing my desk. I keep a record book. I keep records of everything. It is the key to profit in the theatre, Mr. Holmes. Records. Actors don't have the head for it, nor should they be expected to. Their minds are meant for finer things."

Stoker's gaze rested reverently upon the image of Henry Irving as Hamlet.

Caine put down his glass with an impatient gesture. "As is yours, Bram, as is your own! Mr. Holmes, I've been trying to persuade Bram to take a leave from the Lyceum. He's got the bloody place working like clockwork, he can well afford to step away from the reins. He must have time for his own work. You know I'm right, Bram. You'll never finish it if you don't. Come with me to America."

Stoker shook his head. "You forget that I have just returned from our American and Canadian tour. Now we are working on our new production."

"There is always a new production. There will always be a new production for Henry Irving. What is wanted is a new work from Bram Stoker." Caine thumped the arm of his chair.

"Sales of my previous works hardly lead one to that conclusion," Stoker said quietly.

There was an awkward silence. Watson didn't want to admit that he had never heard of Bram Stoker, as a writer or otherwise, before now. But he always had a thrill of pride, both for the work itself and the honour it showed for Holmes's work, when readers asked what he was writing up at the moment.  He presumed that Stoker might feel similarly.

"What are you working on now, Mr. Stoker?"

Stoker gestured to the untidy manuscript. "A novel. For some time now. When I can spare the time from my duties at the theatre." He clearly did not wish to divulge any particulars of the work.

"Would you be willing to allow me to examine that account book for the costumes, Mr. Stoker? I wish to locate the man that was wearing that costume tonight."

"It happens I have it here. I have been taking some work home," he said wearily, and Caine frowned and cursed under his breath. Stoker rose and went to his writing desk and began to examine a ledger book by the lamplight.

In rising, Stoker knocked some pages of his manuscript to the carpet. Watson picked it up and attempted to sort the pages into order, which was difficult as it was apparently composed on many different sizes and types of paper, even the backs of hotel envelopes and theatre programs. He could not help scanning the words involuntarily and felt Holmes's eyes on the page as well:

_Book I - Transylvania_

_Solicitor's clerk_

_Trapped_

_Loneliness_

_Kiss_

_Dracula: "This man belongs to me, I want him."_

_Book II - Whitby_

_Ch. 1: Whitby. Uncanny things._

_Ch. 2: Whitby. The storm. Ship arrives._

_Ch. 3: Whitby. Lucy sleepwalks. Bloody._

 

Stoker glanced up as Watson hastily replaced the note with the other papers. Stoker returned with the account book, frowning.

"I was wrong. We did hire out some costumes, two weeks ago. But I didn't sign it, it was one of our stage assistants. That is irregular. But here is the note. A Mr. Edward Smith. They are to be returned next week."

"Perhaps you would be so good as to send for me if Mr. Smith returns them personally. I rather doubt that he will. Meanwhile, his address, if you please?"

Stoker paused. "I am not certain that the business affairs of the Lyceum should be open to third parties, without good cause. I was grateful for your help in that other matter, but. . . "

Holmes looked Stoker directly in the eye with that keen grey gaze that seemed to pierce one's soul, as Watson well knew from long experience.

"Mr. Holmes always has good cause for all that he does," he heard himself say in acid tones that would have just as easily fallen from Holmes's own lips.

"Thank you, Watson. Let me ask a different question. Have you received any unusual correspondence within the past few days? Correspondence of an unwelcome or perhaps, even threatening nature?"

Stoker appeared stunned and Caine made an impatient movement as if he might be on the point of objecting.

"I don't know what you mean," Stoker whispered. "If you insist, I'll give you that address. But I don't believe I can be of further assistance, Mr. Holmes."

Watson observed the colour drain from Stoker's face, his reddish beard making the pallor all the more apparent. Stoker gripped the back of his armchair. He almost thought the man might even faint.

Holmes approached a bookcase and withdrew a small framed sketch from the shelf. He held it out to Stoker. "I could not help noticing you have been writing about Whitby," he said. "Did you draw this?"

Stoker seemed tongue-tied, and looked to Caine almost as if for permission to speak. Caine gave a slow nod.

"I sketch. A bit. I did that . . . some years ago."

"Whitby Abbey," Holmes said when Stoker failed to provide that information. "It is a competent rendering. I wonder if you made any sketches of other sights near Whitby? For example, Duncombe Park?"

Stoker turned away, examining his bookcases, which displayed a few small framed sketches here and there. "I don't believe I did," he said without turning around. "Are you interested in Whitby, Mr. Holmes?"

"I am interested in everything, Mr. Stoker," Holmes said in that grandiose manner that perhaps only he could carry off, but Watson folded his arms because he knew it wasn't actually true. There were many things that Sherlock Holmes wasn't remotely interested in. Even things that most people cared about a great deal.

Caine drained his glass and rose. "That's me for home, Bram. Remember what I said. I'll call again tomorrow, if I can."

Stoker had already returned his attention to the stack of account-books on his desk. "I will remember," he said softly.

The interview was obviously at a close. Stoker replaced the sketch of Whitby Abbey in its place on the shelf, then took down a book.

"Doctor Watson. Have you had the pleasure of reading Mr. Caine's 'The Deemster?'"

"Not yet, I confess, but I should be very glad to. I have, of course, heard of it -- as everyone in the world has, I'm sure." The truth was that Hall Caine was probably the bestselling novelist in England, and The Deemster, a rustic novel set in his home of the Isle of Man had run to 50 editions and been translated into a dozen languages.

Stoker handed the volume to Watson, and Caine modestly agreed to his request to sign it, and they all prepared to walk out together when they were stopped by the sound of a woman stifling her sobs from some room nearby. Stoker scowled, and Watson wondered at the change, from his reticence and seeming gentleness moments before, to near fury.

"You will forgive Mrs. Stoker, gentlemen. This week has been a trial for her. Even after all this time. It's his own damned fault!" Stoker exploded. "Parading about, making a complete spectacle of himself, not to mention his indiscretion with The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oscar Wilde has not the slightest shred of --- "

"Bram," Caine said, a firm hand on Stoker's shoulder. "It is infamous! To think -- that we have feted him, and clasped his hand in friendship. But it's nothing to do with us. Leave it, Bram."

They said their goodbyes, and went down into the street. There were no cabs at that hour, and they walked together in search of one on the main road. The fog was very thick now.

"I hope we meet again," Watson said, trying to end the uncomfortable encounter on a more pleasant, or at least gentlemanlike, note.

"I am not likely to be in England for some time," Caine said shortly. "But I wish you both good luck."

"Good luck?"

"In your adventures, of course," Caine said with a wry tip of his hat, and disappeared into the fog.

# # #

In the cab, Holmes occupied himself staring out the narrow window, although nothing could be seen but the shadows of passing carriages and dim lamplights.

"Why was Mrs. Stoker crying, Holmes?"

"Ah. That. As always, Watson, the only feature of interest for you is the love interest. Mrs. Stoker was engaged, or perhaps more accurately, nearly engaged, to Oscar Wilde. For a time. She was reputed to be the greatest beauty in Ireland, perhaps in England. But she married Stoker instead, in the end."

Watson regretted not having met Mrs. Stoker, and then upbraided himself. He had no business at all speculating upon the attractions of a woman who was not his wife. He supposed Mary was home now, and that he would find a note from her when they arrived at Baker Street.

"She seems to still have some. . . strong feeling for Wilde," Watson ventured. The truth is that he did not find women easy to understand, but their tears never failed to move him. "I don't think Stoker likes it. Not a bit."

"Hmmmm," Holmes hummed ambiguously.

Upon returning to Baker Street, Holmes drew some volumes from his shelves and began reading. It was far too late, after all, to go to bed. Watson figured he would sleep on the train.

There had been no note from Mary, after all.

He sat quietly with Holmes and opened the book that Stoker had given him, Caine's The Deemster. It was set on the Isle of Man, where Watson had never been. The novel was filled with quaint language and incidents. Watson's eyes were growing heavy when he reached a passage where two men, the best of friends, were having a terrible quarrel:

_At that Ewan flung away the hand of his wife, and, quivering from head to foot, he strode toward Dan._

_"You've called me a liar," he said, in a shrill voice that was like a cry. "Now, you shall prove your word--you shall fight me--you shall, by God." He was completely carried away by passion._

_Dan stood a moment. He looked down from his great height at Ewan's quivering form and distorted face._  
_Then he turned about and glanced into the faces of the people. In another instant his eyes were swimming in tears; he took a step toward Ewan, flung his arms about him, and buried his head in his neck, and the great stalwart lad wept like a little child. In another moment Ewan's passion was melted away, and he kissed Dan on the cheek._

_"Blubbering cowards!" "Och, man alive, a pair of turtle-doves!"_

 

Watson's cheeks burned and he hastily turned the page.

He mentally reviewed their visit to the Stoker household. Hall Caine's restraining hand on Stoker's shoulder. Stoker's changeable mood. Mrs. Stoker's sobs. Caine leaving for America, wishing for Stoker to come.

He didn't yet know what Holmes's true purpose was in visiting Stoker. He reminded himself to make notes of their visit in the morning, in case anything should prove important later.

Notes. This led to thoughts of Stoker's notes for his novel.

In it, a person with the unusual name "Dracula" said, _"This man belongs to me, I want him."_

He turned toward Holmes, but the detective was utterly absorbed in his studies, his long legs stretched out before him and the firelight catching the folds of his dressing gown.


	7. A Tight Spot

The next morning Watson was almost surprised to see Holmes's tall, elegant shadow in the doorway to his room. Despite Holmes' resignation and even seeming acceptance of his role in the mysterious affair over champagne and oysters the night before, he had rather expected Holmes to dodge him in the middle of the night. Yet here was Holmes, clad in his traveling cloak, rapping against the door to rouse him. If he didn't get out of bed instantly, it was not unknown for Holmes to shake him out. Holmes detested waiting for anyone or anything, most especially when he was on the chase.

Watson pushed out of his warm bed (far more comfortable than the unyielding bed at his new home with Mary), instantly wide awake. He still had the constitution and habits of a soldier. He kept a change of clothes here and hastily began packing his bag. Holmes leaned against the door frame.

"We must try to catch this Mr. 'Edward Smith' before he goes out.   I didn't take him for much of an early riser. If we make haste, we can see about this Smith, and still catch the train."

Watson began shedding his night shirt and tugging on his trousers. Holmes instantly turned his back for modesty, but did not withdraw.

Watson found Holmes's somewhat unusual degree of reticence almost amusing. In the Army, particularly in Afghanistan, men who were not senior officers did not have the luxury of private dressing rooms. Watson had become inured to getting in and out of uniform at odd hours on an instant's notice, and while he certainly never made an effort to put his physique on display as some of his vainer fellow soldiers had liked to do, he wasn't afraid of anyone seeing him unclothed. Unlike many of his fellow physicians, he instinctively disliked the prudery that modern manners imposed on men and women alike as unhealthy.

The only place where Watson had ever observed Holmes to relax his rigid sense of privacy in such matters was in the Turkish baths, where even the most fastidious gentlemen bathed nude in the pools, and lay under clean towels to take the steam or submit to luxurious shampoo and massage. It had become a pleasurable ritual for them both, and they took to the baths as often as practicable. The spectacular London Hammam in Jermyn Street was a special treat, but the more humble baths in Baker Street would do just as well when Holmes sought relief from the fatigues of a case or to give his restless brain a blessed period of respite. It was a remarkable sight to see the keen, greyhound-like Sherlock Holmes slowly relax and soften under the intense steam and heat.

"Watson! Are you quite awake? You look as if you are dreaming."

Holmes had turned back around now that Watson was fully clothed. Watson immediately drove all thoughts of the Turkish baths from his mind.

"Sorry. I could do with coffee."

"No time! We can take breakfast on the train. Come, Watson!"

# # #

Mr. 'Edward Smith' resided in a shabby rented room at near the top of a disreputable rooming house in Wapping. Having ascertained from a taciturn laundress in the adjoining room that the "swell officer-like gentleman" had come in around midnight but had gone straight back out again, Holmes gave the woman some coins and waited for her to return to her mountains of laundry, whereupon he withdrew a cunning set of locksmith's tools. Holmes's long fingers unerringly manipulated the tools, the lock yielded, and they were inside.

Thin morning light streamed through tattered draperies. The rooms were furnished with the barest of pieces, a small table, a narrow bed, a worn piece of Turkey carpet. The fire was cold.

"It doesn't look like he can have been here very long," Watson observed. He couldn't allow himself to pity the blackguard. But in truth, this was barely a step above the cheerless room he had taken upon his return from Afghanistan, and he felt something like a stab of sympathy. Though his stay there had been short, he had spent the loneliest of hours there, and he didn't care to remember it. He disliked the place and wished they could be gone. He wanted to be on the train, rushing by steam engine toward the next piece of puzzle, comfortably ensconced in a private car.

Hung on a peg was the very red-coated costume of an Army uniform with captain's braiding that they had seen on the man from the American Bar. Watson's blood rose just to see it. Holmes carefully took it down and inspected it, looking in the pockets and searching about the lining. Watson gritted his teeth. He didn't like to see Holmes touching the disreputable costume. There had been several scandals in the papers of young, handsome soldiers in just such uniforms - genuine, unfortunately -- prostituting themselves in private clubs and even near the London barracks, to gentlemen and aristocrats.

There was a paper in one of the pockets. "Remarkable. It truly is very like my hand. The paper is not so good as mine, now that I see it in the morning light. This one invites you to meet me at the Jermyn Street baths."

"I suppose that means that this fellow 'Smith' knew that we frequent those baths."

Watson hadn't known what to expect when Holmes had told him that they should try to intercept Smith, probably nothing more than an interrogation-- but he had prepared for more. He had his pistol in his pocket. But he couldn't have imagined this. His rising blood fell to a sort of nauseous temper. Just an hour ago, he had been thinking with pleasure of those private moments between him and Holmes. Now he thought that they must have been spied upon, either by this low imposter or someone in league with him, although he told himself that there was absolutely nothing for anyone to see even if they did.

"I don't believe that this fellow, 'Edward Smith,' whatever his real name may be, wrote this note, nor the other that brought you to the Savoy last night. There is no ink or paper anywhere about this room. It is possible, of course, that he took these articles with him, but I see no evidence of recent writing on the table. It is quite covered with dust and grime, and hasn't been disturbed in weeks, I should think. He must take all his meals out. A person attempting to imitate another's hand would have to practice, and would almost certainly leave ink stains about the table. If he wrote at night, he would have needed a lamp or candle, and there is none here, nor any marks of it. No, someone else wrote the notes, and gave them to him."

"Why should they want this fellow to act for them? Why not just have the notes delivered by post or a telegram?"

Holmes regarded him with a clouded eyes and a tight-lipped sort of smile, signaling he was engaged in deep plots that he was not prepared to share. Watson sat with an unceremonious thump on the edge of the sagging bed, which recollected to him again his lonely room before 221b. He tried instead to imagine his present home, the newly-furnished villa he had taken upon his marriage to Mary, but ended thinking of Baker Street. Wasn't that why he was here, now? Marriage had done nothing at all to diminish his taste for adventure with his companion. But he was impatient of being left in the dark in this perplexing affair.

"All right, Holmes. I've been patient long enough, and I haven't had my coffee yet. I'll ask again what I asked in the Savoy. What the devil is going on?"

"Can you not understand it?"

"No. Not a bit."

"Someone wanted to ensure that I understand that they are capable of planting false letters, letters which will be accepted as having been written by me."

"What could anyone do with notes from you to me, asking me to meet you at the American Bar? Or the baths?"

Holmes wouldn't meet his eyes. "'Edward Smith' could very well have had us arrested last night, you know. I presume that if he had truly intended it, that he could have brought it off. He was trying to make a . . . spectacle of the sort that would, ah, necessarily lead to the charge of-- must I say it, Watson?"

For the words "gross indecency" to fall from Holmes's ascetic lips would be a kind of horror. He held up his hand to prevent it. He realized where he was sitting, a sordid bed that undoubtedly had been used by the licentious 'Smith' for his degrading transactions. He glanced down and saw, as Holmes must have seen from the very first, the telltale stains on the thin coverlet. He stood.

"Arrested? Surely not!"

Holmes regarded him with patient coolness until Watson realised he was perfectly serious. He remembered again the sight of Holmes and Smith's bodies struggling together on the floor, the knowing mutters of men all around, and the gratifying sting of his fist against Smith's face.

"Who would want to do such a thing to you, Holmes? To both of us, as the notes obviously are intended to involve me in. . . this. It is an outrage. Now, of all times. You don't think -- "

"I don't know, I don't know," Holmes said, almost despairingly, which was so entirely unlike Holmses's usual arrogant assurance that Watson was quite stunned. Under any other circumstance he would have gripped his friend by the shoulder in reassurance but he kept his hands at his sides.

"I thought at first it was Queensberry.   To punish me for refusing to set up witnesses against Oscar Wilde.   But Stoker's account book shows that this 'Smith' borrowed the costume two weeks ago, well before Queensberry called upon me. Now, he could have made the provision in advance, in the anticipation that I might refuse -- but such deep plotting seems to me contrary to his crude nature. No, it is someone else, I fear. Someone worse."

"Worse than Queensberry!"

"You know, Watson, Stoker was right. Mr. Wilde has not troubled to conceal what he calls his 'friendships' with young men. Wilde has come to me more than once, you know, when he has been blackmailed over stolen letters. Letters which could easily be read as. . . more than what they were. Perhaps. He should never have risen to Queensberry's bait.   Now Wilde will fall, I fear, much further than he has risen."

# # #

He had known of Holmes's consultations with Mr. Wilde, of course, although he had never admitted Watson into their counsels. Wilde had been at Baker Street several times, arriving discreetly, muffled up in a dark cloak and hat, quite unlike his notoriously dandyish attire about town, which included colourful velvet waistcoats and lavender gloves. Unable to avoid overhearing Wilde's loud, ostentatious drawl, Watson had been put out of sorts and left 221B to take aimless walks in Regent's Park. One such night the sound of Holmes's violin floating down from the half-open window upon his return had made him hold his breath to hear whether Wilde was his audience, which made him feel a shameful eavesdropper, but he hadn't been able to help it. Holmes never played for anyone but himself alone, and him. But Wilde had gone. Yet Holmes had stayed shut up in his study, playing melancholy strains on his violin until dawn.

"So. . . you believe Mr. Wilde to be. . . guilty, then?" It was an uncomfortable question to ask of Holmes, but while Holmes was impervious to human emotion, including weaknesses of the flesh, he was not, Watson knew, in any way innocent of the knowledge of the weaknesses of others. He was unfailingly able to detect such frailties and failings, and used them without remorse to solve his cases.

Holmes didn't answer his question. Instead, his attention was fixed upon something on the floor. Watson looked down to see a paper on the floor beneath his feet.

"I must have dislodged it when I sat on the bed," Watson said, plucking it up. At first glance it looked to be yet another letter forged in Holmes's hand, but this one a scrap of yellowed paper as though torn from a book.

Holmes reached for it, but Watson stubbornly read it himself. He didn't want Holmes trying to shield him from any part of this.

 

" _I hate, and I love._

_Perhaps you will ask,_

_why do I do so?_

_I do not know._

_But I feel it._

_And I am in agony."_

"Catullus," Watson said shortly.

Unlike Holmes, he hadn't been at Cambridge, but Latin courses were fundamental to medical studies and he had once had rooms with a student with a penchant for the Latin poets, whose romantic nature had been overwhelmed by the anatomy courses. He had dropped out, leaving behind a few volumes, he said, to relieve Watson from the tedium of sawing through corpses. Watson had on occasion read them as a change to his dry medical texts, and had sometimes been touched by the pure and noble sentiments of the ancient poets, and had wondered, without much caring, why some thought Catullus in particular improper. He had been surprised to find a volume of Catullus amongst Holmes's own library, which was varied, but tended mainly to science, mathematics, and studies of historical crimes.

"Well spotted, Watson. I didn't know you knew the Latin poets."

"Whoever forged this can't hope to pass this off as yours, surely!"

Holmes gave a curt nod. "Indeed. You know me by now, Watson."

"At any rate, poetry isn't grounds for arrest.   Not yet, at least."

Holmes took the note and carefully folded it into his pocket. "Actually, one of the letters that Wilde was blackmailed over contained poetry."

"Of an, ah, improper nature, I imagine," Watson said. He hadn't read any of Wilde's works, nor seen his recent sensation, " _The Importance of Being Earnest,"_ but as a writer he kept an eye on the critics, and knew that Wilde's works were denounced for being decadent, even obscene.

"I shouldn't have thought so, as it was Shakespeare's Sonnet Number Twenty. But Wilde had written that novel, _'Portrait of Mr. W.H._ ,' arguing that Shakespeare was inspired by his love for a young actor, Will Hugh.   Wilde's letter was addressed to a certain young nobleman whom I will not name. Wilde was most anxious to get the letter back."

"And did he? Get the letter back?"

"It was easily done. Unfortunately, copies had been made. Not so convincing as these little notes, however."

"Who was the blackmailer? Is it the same man then? By God, I'll thrash him!"

"No, it's not the same man. He would have already been to 221B, demanding money. He wouldn't waste time in creating this little mystery. No, whatever this is about, it isn't money."

# # #

Watson was accustomed to fighting blind in the dark with Holmes against adversaries whose identities were only revealed when Holmes had trapped and unmasked them, leaving them with no escape. He didn't know how he would bear knowing that that some foul blackmailer was attempting to falsely entrap and unmask Holmes with a web of base lies. He could barely endure the thought of it. He knew he should be more afraid for himself, as the blackmailer wanted to embroil him too, but he honestly could not accept that anyone in the world would believe such accusations against either of them.

Whoever it was had greatly misjudged them, he told himself.

A few more minutes inspecting the shabby premises of Edward Smith yielded nothing further. Holmes was leaving. It was time to catch the train.

They changed cabs twice on the way to the station to assure that they were not followed, and secured a private car in the train to Cambridge, where, Holmes had said, he wanted to see an old college acquaintance. Holmes, typically, had been disinclined to say more, which in the circumstances made Watson rather more uncomfortable than he ordinarily was when he unhesitatingly accompanied Holmes on their far-flung adventures. Watson hated the guilty atmosphere that seemed to surround them. It was unlike anything he had ever felt in Holmes's company, and he saw that Holmes felt it too.

They silently made their way to the dining car, but Watson found that he had quite lost his appetite. He drank coffee and scribbled out his notes of their meeting with Stoker.

"Why did you ask Stoker about Whitby, Holmes?" He had been struck by Stoker's apparent discomfort at Holmes's question about his sketch of the northern seaport, and a place called Duncombe Park. "And about whether he had received any threatening letters? Surely Mr. Stoker isn't being threatened as we are?"

"If he is, he didn't want anyone to know of it. Something was troubling him, however. His nails were bitten to the quick, and he hadn't slept in days. You're a doctor, surely you saw the shadows under Stoker's eyes."

"I did. Perhaps he's working too hard on his new novel." Watson had idly scratched out what he had seen in his glimpse of Stoker's notes, feeling rather low about doing so but instinctively feeling that it might have some connection to their strange affair. "You know, I glanced over one of his notes as they fell last night. They had to do with Whitby. Something about-- uncanny things, a ship in a storm, and a lady sleepwalking. And-- blood. And you haven't answered my question, Holmes."

"Why did I ask Stoker about Whitby? I have an old connection there. But we are going to visit another of my old connections, much closer to home, in Cambridge, as I said.  He may be able to assist us."

Watson thought about their predicament. It was hard to imagine what sort of Cambridge don would have any special knowledge that would help them against a shadowy blackmail scheme of an unspeakable nature. Thinking of their discussions in Edward Smith's dismal flat, he asked, "Is he a literary fellow?"

Holmes almost smiled, and even though it was plainly the memory of whoever the Cambridge chap was who brought it to Holmes's lips, Watson felt much better. "Literary! I should say not. No, he's a sort of experimental chemist."

Holmes tipped his head back and closed his eyes, not sleeping but thinking deeply, or, Watson thought rather darkly, perhaps only wanting to appear so. He was regretting missing breakfast, and decided to see about getting a sandwich. He had no more than put his foot into the narrow corridor when he saw a the back of a tall figure walking past and exiting the car. He would swear he had seen that figure before, most recently on the floor of the American Bar, his legs wrapped around Holmes's. Unless he was seeing things, it was Edward Smith.

"Holmes! We're being followed, I'm sure of it!"

Holmes leaped up. "How do you know?"

"It's Edward Smith again. Not in uniform this time. He has just passed into the next car. I swear I'll -- "

Holmes thought for a moment. "No! He mustn't find us, but if we can, we should follow him. Quick, Watson!"

Holmes darted quickly down the corridor just as the farther compartment door began to open, and pulled Watson behind a narrow door with him. It was a sort of linen cupboard, dark and full of the scent of freshly starched linens. There was not enough room for them to stand side by side, and so Watson slipped behind Holmes to allow him to better hear through the door. The only light was from the slight gap at the bottom of the door. There was a shadow of passing feet. Watson wanted to wrench the door open and have another go at beating Edward Smith to a bloody pulp, but was restrained by Holmes's hand holding him steady, pressing against his shoulder. Holmes undoubtedly knew just what he was thinking.

Watson expelled a sharp breath. It was close in the little space, and getting warmer as they were squeezed together far too close for comfort. He was fairly panting. The rocking of the train kept jostling them together rhythmically. Watson drew back as far as he could against the cupboard, feeling the shelves dig painfully into his back, but could barely avoid the brush of his hips against Holmes's own. They had been together in tight spots before, but perhaps none quite so tight as this, and for some reason he found this proximity to Holmes's body -- elegant limbs and the hard muscles of his back and even lower, his arse pressing back against him every time the train lurched-- unbearable.   Watson knew that if Holmes opened that door, his face would be flaming. It was becoming difficult to hide the fact that a certain other part of his anatomy was also feeling hot, to his mortification, and his heart was pounding so ferociously that he was certain Holmes must hear every thundering beat.  

They stayed like that for some minutes, Watson feeling utterly pinned by his arousal, which despite his valiant struggle to quench it, showed no sign of subsiding. He turned his face into a stack of folded sheets and let out a quiet gasp, which he told himself that Holmes would never hear about the din of the train. But it didn't help. He wondered what Holmes was waiting for.

Then shadows of feet appeared again at the crack of light, and stopped in front of the door. Watson felt Holmes's body coil to spring upon the man if he should open it, and the feel of Holmes's slim, strong body flexing against his own was awakening sensations that he had never known before. Not like this. A memory from his Army days in Afghanistan, of an awkward, illicit embrace in his tent in the middle of a long, lonely watch, a memory that he had sworn to bury forever, rose up in the fire that was apparently consuming not only his body but his brain. Even his determination to think of Mary, as he knew he ought, did nothing to quell the flames. It was a sort of hot and piercing longing, and while it certainly was setting fire to his cock, it was his heart that burned. He thought he might faint with the shock of it.

A hand outside the door was wrenching the door handle, but Holmes was holding it firmly closed.

"Don't move," Holmes leaned back just a few inches more to whisper against his ear.   The brush of his lips and warm breath against the shell of his ear was a new torment to double what he endured. He was gripping the shelf behind him to prevent himself from sagging against Holmes and giving himself completely away. He prayed for the door to open, he could lunge past Holmes to rip this Smith fellow to shreds, and Holmes would never know of what had passed in this little closet.

Or if he did, as Watson feared deep down that he must -- how could he not? -- he would never be so unkind to his dear friend as to speak of it. Sherlock Holmes was a man so cold and controlled in matters of the body and heart that he might almost have been carved whole from a block of pure ice.

Whatever he did, he had to bury these feelings, even deeper than his memory from the tent in Afghanistan. It was this business with Oscar Wilde that was to blame, he knew it.

He was starting to believe what people said was really true: Oscar Wilde was a corruptor of men.


	8. Coffee and Cantharides

 

They made an attempt to follow after Edward Smith, but he was nowhere to be seen. Holmes was unexpectedly indifferent.

"But Holmes -"

Holmes was inspecting his face with an intensity that forced an unwelcome blush to his face. He had noticed his horrifyingly obvious reactions when they were hidden in the closet, then. He resisted the strong impulse to look away, the telltale sign of a guilty conscience. To his utter confusion, Holmes placed a cool hand on his forehead, with an expression that very much looked like Holmes himself felt guilty.

"Did you happen to see who served you coffee in the dining car?"

His heart was still pounding, his blood high. If Holmes didn't back away he wasn't sure what he would do. It felt like he wanted to strike Holmes. Or worse. He was losing his mind.

"What --" he panted. Holmes removed his hand, leaving a sort of ache behind.

"You are feeling. . . not yourself, Watson. Am I right?"

"I am quite all right, Holmes! You are mistaken."

Holmes' lip curled in a rueful half-smile. "Don't shout, Watson. It isn't your fault. Something was put in your coffee. It can only have been Smith as it is ludicrous to suppose that we are being followed by two separate parties on the same train. This was very rash of him, but it confirms my theory. Perhaps you would prefer to lie down."

Watson was transfixed by Holmes's mouth as he spoke. His blush deepened as he tried to erase the images of what he wanted to do with that mouth. Maybe he had always wanted this, but whatever was racing through his bloodstream now was making it impossible to ignore. And he definitely would prefer to lie down.

"What was it?"

Now Holmes was flushing too. This was a rare sight, a delicate rose colour washing over his pale cheekbones and making his inconveniently full lips redden. Watson clenched his fists.

"It was -- pray forgive me, Watson -- an aphrodisiac." Holmes was scrutinizing him with as much attention, if not more, than he gave the most fascinating of murder scenes. Watson knew from long experience that Holmes could see the widening of his pupils, the beat of his pulse at the neck, the rise and fall of his chest from his breath coming faster, and undoubtedly, the bulge of his cock in his trousers that was urgently needing attention.   He wanted to go back to their private car and lock himself inside and away from those knowing eyes, pale as sea glass and yet they burned.

Miraculously, some vestige of his brain was still alert. He wasn't going to ask Holmes how he knew he had been dosed with an aphrodisiac. Such drugs had been handed about in the Army, mostly useless and painful concoctions which could easily be gotten in any foreign town where soldiers were garrisoned. What he wanted to know was why.

"Spanish Fly? Why?"

"Cantharides? Perhaps, but with something added to make it more, ah, subtle, and. . . well. I do hope, for your sake, less painful. As for why, I believe it was simply to send me a message."

"You seem to be getting quite a number of odd messages, Holmes. Pertaining to myself. I find it --" He felt on fire and the power of speech was swiftly abandoning him, to his shame.

Holmes held up his hand and ceased his intense scrutiny and looked down guiltily. "-- Pray accept my apologies, my -- ah, Watson. You don't deserve this, and I swear to you that I shall find the culprit, and he shall pay."

He really couldn't bear standing so close to Holmes any longer in this condition, with both of them well aware of what was happening to his body, to his most intimate parts. With a strangled growl, Watson turned on his heel and stalked back to their car and slammed the door shut.

He knew full well that Holmes was watching after him and he made no effort at all to disguise the difficulty he had walking with a full cockstand. If Holmes knew what was good for him, he would stay away.

But not for long. They would be at the Cambridge station in less than half an hour, he reckoned. He made a halfhearted effort not to touch his weeping cock, but it was impossible. The knowledge that this effect was drug induced freed him from feeling utterly depraved as he gripped his hardness tight, pressing his groans into the back of the swaying seat. Blurred images of hands and lips and limbs from a tent in Afghanistan melted into Holmes's magnificent lips, Holmes's elegant hands, Holmes's long, pale limbs.   It felt like hours that he hovered in this erotic, impossible, shameful dream and his spend was deeper and harder than any he could remember. It drenched his handkerchief. When it was finally over, he lay there shaking, the effect of the drug not yet abated.

But he heard the squeal of the brake and the shudder of the train as it pulled into the station, and he buttoned himself back up and pushed the sodden handkerchief as into the inner pocket of his waistcoat, where it would make a damp spot unless he could discreetly dispose of it very soon. He refused to leave the soiled article shoved into the seat cushions, evidence of his guilt, although he was quite sure that the porters found such things in these private cars every day.  

He shook his head to try to clear it, and took a few deep breaths. The close cabin was full of the scent of his spend and desire. He was discomfited by pangs of disloyalty to Mary, but if this was a form of infidelity, it was one she surely would never learn of.

" _John Watson, pull yourself together, man. Mind over matter, as Holmes says_."

He stepped into the crowds pushing their way down the narrow corridor toward the platform.

Holmes was waiting for him with their cases. Watson expected Holmes would be damnably polite about the whole thing, giving him wide berth and generally ignoring the entire incident in order to preserve his dignity. Of course, he would know precisely what had just occurred, given the circumstances. Watson found himself unaccountably irritated by the thought. This was all Holmes's fault, he knew it even if he was still in the dark about the entire affair.

"Are you all right," Holmes asked softly. Watson could barely hear him over the cacophony on the platform.

"I am." He attempted to be surreptitious when he tossed his soiled handkerchief in a bin, but he also knew that it did not escape Holmes's notice.  He suppressed an entirely inappropriate, no doubt drug induced, smile and forgot all about feeling guilty about his wife.

# # #

 ** _Dominick Jessop, Chemist_** , was the barely legible sign hanging above an apparently derelict shop. The windows were coated with grime. They were in a little out-of-the-way warren of ancient cobblestone streets near the great precincts of the colleges of Cambridge.   There was no one about, and had not been for a long while by all appearances.

Holmes pushed the door open, and they entered. A melancholy bell rang somewhere. The dim space was lined with mostly empty glass cases, like the ones in the British Museum. Dust motes fell as thick as early snow and an acrid smoky odour drifted from the shadows at the back of the shop.

"I'll be bloody damned!" A male voice shouted, so unexpectedly and at such volume that Watson nearly jumped. But his war-honed nerves kept him planted firmly at Holmes's side.

"Years ago, I should have thought," Holmes called out.

Watson hadn't known what to expect, but it hadn't been a saturnine, red-headed man wearing a leather apron covered in dark stains.

"How are you, Jessop," Holmes said, shaking the man's hand.

"Sherlock Holmes! By God! Just the man I want."

Watson noted Holmes's broad grin, a very rare sight, and he suddenly seemed a mere Cambridge youth.

"Got yourself in too deep again, Jessop, hmmm? But first, may I introduce Doctor Watson."

Jessop shook his hand vigorously. "You write grippingly, Doctor Watson. Knowing Holmes, though, I'm sure you are only telling the half of it."

They followed Jessop to the back of the shop, where there was a sort of chemist's laboratory, even more disorderly than Holmes's apparatus in Baker Street. Jessop morosely inspected a beaker of sickly yellow fluid.

"What is it?" Watson asked. It looked rather like urine, and smelled of sulphur.

"A tonic. For hair loss. But look."

He held out his arm and rolled up his sleeve. There was a wide pale stripe of bare skin amongst his abundantly curly red hairs.

"A decided failure," Holmes observed. "But you know, Jessop, the only known preventative for hair loss in males is castration at puberty."

Watson actually recalled this from medical college, even though any reference to castration induced, as always, an instinctive shrinking of his parts. Which, in the circumstances, was not actually unwelcome. The effect of whatever he had been dosed with on the train was wearing off far too slowly.

"That is noted in Hippocrates," he announced to cover his discomfort. Then he had a strange thought. How did Holmes know this?

Jessop sighed bitterly and poured the liquid into a bucket. "Someday I'll make my fortune on this, wait and see."

"You said that I was just the man you wanted. I hope you weren't referring to this. I'm afraid it is not an area that holds much interest in the area of criminal detection. Although I recall a manslaughter charge five years ago against a quack chemist who poisoned a man with a hair tonic. Arsenic."

"I was on the point of sending for you, Holmes." He gave Watson a guarded glance. "If we might speak in private. I beg your pardon, Doctor Watson."

"By no means, " Holmes said. He had thought hard about this on the train. His impulse had been to conceal from Watson, as much as possible, the matter that Lestrade had brought him. But at Marquand's, Watson had made his resolution quite clear. He was quietly astounded that being secretly dosed with an aphrodisiac had not put Watson off. If anything, he seemed more determined than ever and was hovering rather aggressively at his side, interposing himself between his person and Jessop in a way that was almost ungentlemanlike. Although he usually found Watson to be wildly off the mark when it came to deductions, as a detector of danger Watson was always reliable. He wondered what threat Watson sensed from his old acquaintance Dominick Jessop, whom he had not set eyes upon since his Cambridge days, more than ten years.

"Doctor Watson is privy to all my cases, and although I must beg his pardon for not disclosing the facts of this one to him as fully as I ought to have done. But now we will have it out and I hope. . . well, I hope he will forgive me. Am I correct in assuming, Jessop, that you have received a strange letter?"

Jessop nodded grimly and brought out a rolled paper, which he proffered to Holmes.

It was the same strange crest, an engraving of entwined salamanders in flames. " _Nutrisco Aut Extinguetur_." One of the salamanders had a face that unmistakably was Jessop's forbidding visage. The other Watson did not recognise, but he thought Holmes did.

 _"I nourish or I will be extinguished,"_ Jessop said gravely. "It's got to be one of the Hellbenders, doesn't it? But who?"

"Hellbenders?"

"We Hellbenders were a club at Cambridge," Holmes said, with a hesitancy that made Watson somewhat afraid of whatever he was about to say. Holmes was nothing if not courageous, and it seemed that he was reluctant to speak of this Cambridge club. If he didn't know Holmes better, he would have said he was even afraid. "The salamander was our emblem. The Hellbenders were a rather select club. Even . . . secret. Jessop and I were in it for the chemistry. Some of the other fellows were poets, or historians. We had a botanist, I believe, as well."

"What were your . . . interests?" Watson asked, transfixed by the engraving. The longer he looked, the more obscene the thing seemed to him. And it wasn't the effect of what he had been dosed with on the train, although it was still making his blood sting.

"You're quite sure you wish to speak of this before Doctor Watson." Holmes clenched his jaw and nodded sharply without meeting Watson's curious gaze. "Then I must contradict you, Holmes. You're being too discreet, and too generous. I was in the Hellbenders for Eddie's sake, you know that. You were our true chemist."

Watson was quietly astounded at the unmistakable tenderness in Jessop's tone when he spoke of his university friend, 'Eddie.' Jessop let the silence stretch out until he was certain that Watson clearly understood his meaning.

Watson understood.

Holmes, in a secret club.   Of men who were bound by, as Wilde was reported to have declared in his defence in court, " _the love that dare not speak its name."_ It was like an earthquake he had experienced in Afghanistan, the earth jolting beneath his feet as though it might open up and swallow him, reducing the local stone huts to rubble.   His head felt as if it would burst.

He tried to imagine it, Holmes as a university student, surrounded by such companions. "Uranians," he believed such men called themselves, or at least he had heard scraps of whispers of such things. The very idea of the misanthropic Holmes associating himself with such men so far as to actually join their club was one of the greatest shocks of his life. He couldn't help recalling the vile "Captain" Smith, pressing suggestively against Holmes's lean body on the floor of the American Bar.   He should have beaten the man then and there like the rogue that he clearly was. But . . . were his attentions to Holmes really so unwelcome, then, after all? He banished the unworthy thought as quickly as it came, bit his tongue and waited, breathless, to hear more.

"And you have had a note from Eddie, isn't that right?"

"Yes. He's gotten the same damned engraving. Nobody cares about my reputation anymore, not even me. . . But Eddie -- he's got his wife, his title, and his responsibilities. He'll be ruined, and worse than ruined. They say Oscar Wilde is going to prison, and I've a friend with the local coppers that thinks there's to be more such trials. Eddie being Viscount Halbourne isn't going to shield him."

Holmes withdrew a rolled paper from his coat and slowly opened it. Even in the dim light, Watson could plainly see that it was engraving of two salamanders in a seeming carnal embrace, identical to Jessop's drawing, with a significant difference.

The faces were Holmes's, and his own.


	9. A Single Bed

The little bell of the shop door tinkled. Footsteps approached, and there was a sharp rap against what sounded like one of the glass cases. "Out front if you please, Mister Jessop. Police."

They froze. Sherlock raised an eyebrow and Watson looked shocked, but Jessop shook his head and put his fingers to his lips.

"I won't be a moment," Jessop called out. He removed his apron and smoothed his unruly hair and went out to the shop. Holmes and Watson remained silent, listening.

"Afternoon, constable. May I be of assistance?"

"I'm looking for two gentlemen, names of . . . Mister Sherlock Holmes and Doctor John Watson." This was said slowly, as though the constable were reading out from a paper. "They were seen entering your shop not an hour since. Are they here?"

"No, they are not. They did stop here, but left at least half an hour ago."

"How do you know these . . gentlemen?" This was said with unmistakable scorn. Watson's blood instantly rose and he made an unconscious move toward the door. His impulse was to disclose their presence and chastise this impudent constable for his disrespect. Holmes, however, restrained him gently by the arm, his expression somber.

"Mr. Holmes and I were at Cambridge together," Jessop said in cutting tones. "Not that it is any business of the police. What do you want with those gentlemen?"

"A complaint has been sworn against them, sir."

"Do you mean to say you have a warrant?"

"I do, sir. That I do. Two, in fact."

"I can't believe it," Jessop said. "I won't say another word unless you show me your warrants. This must be a gross misunderstanding."

"Interesting you use that word, sir."

Jessop read out in a louder voice, so that they could clearly hear, _"Mr Sherlock Holmes of 221B Baker Street, Marylebone, London. . . charges: two counts of acts of gross indecency with another male person."_ And Doctor Watson as well! This is an outrage! Who made these scurrilous charges?"

"That is not for me to say, sir, as you may be a witness. All will be told in its proper time, I'm sure. Are you quite certain that Mister Holmes and Doctor Watson are not here? What's behind that door?"

# # #

Holmes seized two bottles from Jessop's cluttered collection and hastily poured them into a beaker.   A putrid-smelling smoke instantly billowed up, filling the room with a choking vapour that stung their eyes. Holmes silently grasped Watson's hand and pulled him back into a narrow hallway that gave onto a dark stairwell.

Behind them Jessop was shouting that the constable had made him ruin his latest dose, and then the constable coughed and sputtered as he entered the cloud of smoke.

The stairway led both up and down, presumably to a cellar. They exchanged glances and by common agreement, fled as quietly as they could up the stair. It twisted up two flights, and ended at a door that led into a garret crammed with all manner of ancient trunks, broken bits of furniture, and boxes of unsold remedies. The only way out was back down the stair, or the single tiny window, very high, that was three storeys up from the street.

Holmes began stacking dusty crates labeled " _Dr Tumblety's Supreme Liver Remedy for Purification of the Blood,"_ while they strained their ears for the following footsteps of the constable.

"Holmes," Watson hissed. "We haven't done anything wrong, not like - not that. Should we be running?" His conscience rebelled against fleeing, especially in the face of such a charge. But the spectre of Oscar Wilde hung there between them, as though Wilde were an actual ghost that haunted them and not a living man. Despite their imminent peril, Holmes stopped and regarded Watson with such evident tenderness that it stole Watson's breath.

"I will go down with you if you wish it, Watson. You must know what will happen.  It is vile, and wrong in every proper moral sense. But I am with you. Do you wish to give ourselves over?"

There was some argument below between the constable and Jessop, and it seemed that any moment their hiding place might be discovered. Watson hesitated.

He knew it was cowardly to flee. But he didn't fancy following in Wilde's footsteps, being put on trial - and for what? It was easy enough, he supposed, for accusations to be made, even fabricated. And while he wanted to believe that all that would be required to face down such charges would be his word and honour as a gentleman and former officer of Her Majesty's Army, he could not endure the thought of Holmes being submitted to such public indignity. Especially since learning within the past hour that it was entirely possible that Holmes himself was, or had been in his Cambridge days, of that persuasion.

He would have to trust that there was another way, if they could purchase time to find it.

"No," he replied. "We aren't giving ourselves up."

# # #

Holmes scrambled up the stacked cases and began to prise open the window with his pocket knife. Watson watched anxiously. It was evidently stuck from layers of paint and grime. The cases started to give way under Holmes's weight.  Watson grasped Holmes's legs to support him, but it was no good. The bottommost case collapsed with a crunch of glass, and a vile but familiar-smelling fluid seeped out onto the floorboards. He gasped when the carton burst open, and a few unbroken jars of what appeared to be anatomical specimens preserved in formaldehyde rolled out, bringing back memories of the rather macabre collection at his medical college.

"Hurry, Holmes."

He peered at the cloudy jars. They seemed to contain fleshy organs that could only be human uteri, or matrices, as he had been taught in his anatomy lectures.  

The window finally gave way and Holmes deftly climbed up and out window, lowering his hand for Watson to follow. Watson scrambled up to what proved to be a gabled rooftop.

The constable's heavy step was on the stair. But the broken glass and leaking fluid beneath the window would give them away.

"Wait!" Holmes stretched a long leg down to push the window closed behind them. Watson was momentarily disoriented by the vertiginous drop to the street below but firmly hauled Holmes upright. They gripped the chimney pot for balance, startling the pigeons into an explosion of wings.

Now the constable's voice was directly below their feet. There was nothing for it. On either side of them, the attached roofs stretched for considerable distance, twisting along the old streets. Holmes made a quick decision and they headed in a northerly direction, as quietly as they might, but roof slates tumbled down, betraying them.   If this were London, Watson figured they would have already been taken.   Running low with his head down brought him back to terrible battles in the Afghan hills, with bullets and canon flying all around, and the cries of wounded and dying men. He shook the terrible memories away and followed after Holmes's dark, slender figure until they reached an impasse - the rooftops abruptly stopped.

Below on either side were narrow streets, too far to jump without breaking their legs, or worse. At the end was a mansion of considerable size, surrounded by a wall mounted with iron tips. But the branch of an old oak tree, like an outstretched arm, beckoned. Before he could think twice about the lunacy of the plan, Holmes had gracefully leaped onto the branch, and clambered to the lower one to allow Watson to follow. Watson glared at Holmes, his stature making the leap a greater risk, but he had never been one to hesitate and so he took the leap, ignoring the gleaming black spikes that would have pierced him through if he were to fall.

They waited a few moments in the cool green gloom of the tree. It would have been pleasant, a reminder of childhood escapades, if their circumstances had not been so grim.

There were no following footsteps on the roof behind.

"They will be looking for us in the street," Watson whispered. He could not quite believe it. His sense of outrage was coming back. Why should they be hunted like criminals, who had done so much to catch some of Britain's very worst?

"No," Holmes said. "This is Cambridge, not London. I expect they will search the streets around Jacoby's shop thoroughly and then move on to other matters. We will be looked out for, no doubt, and must take care not to be seen. They will be watching at the train stations. We must leave Cambridge, but not until tomorrow. When dark falls, I will take us to a safe place for the night."

Holmes looked quite as comfortable as if he had been stretched out on the sofa in 221B. They waited in the quiet, listening hard for sounds of pursuit in the everyday noises of the street. It was almost a companionable watch, like many they had endured before now. But they both were conscious of the reason for their predicament and there was an awkwardness that hadn't been there before, even if they were hiding most awkwardly in a tree.

# # #

Finally the dark came, and they climbed as silently as they could to the grounds below, grateful that there was no dog guarding the house. Inside, a servant was lighting lamps. Holmes seemed to instinctively know his way, and found a gate in the wall of the kitchen garden behind the house.  The stout lock gave way to Holmes's clever lock-picking tool and they emerged into a quiet street of well-tended houses, with carriages passing through, but Holmes did not try to hire a carriage.

Watson followed silently behind Holmes. They had left their cases behind in Jacoby's shop, but he didn't worry about that. He had some money and his pistol in the pocket of his coat.

By roundabout ways, Holmes led them through increasingly grubbier, poorer, and finally, squalid streets. This was Cambridge and so, the precincts were not as downtrodden and cutthroat as London's Devil's Acre, but Watson kept a firm hand on his pistol and a sharp eye out as they passed darkened doorways, where disreputable-looking men watched after them. Finally, they reached a rundown half-timbered pub with a faded sign, " _The Pen & Quill_."

If Watson had expected the pub to be frequented by Cambridge scholars, he was mistaken. Although the outlines of Cambridge's halls had seemed to overshadow them during their flight, this neighborhood was a world apart from what he had imagined Cambridge would be. But he wasn't at all surprised that Sherlock Holmes should be welcomed here. A few murmured words between Holmes and the barman and they were climbing up to a little room above the pub.

There was a single bed. A tiny coal fire, bureau, basin and pitcher completed the room's modest furnishings.

Watson stood uncertainly in the middle of the room and Holmes unavoidably stooped over him, as the beamed ceiling was very low.

Holmes folded his long legs and sat on the floor, leaning against the wall.

"Take the bed, Watson, I insist. We are quite safe. The police will not look for us here. We will leave before dawn. I can sleep on the train, if need be."

"Now listen to me, Holmes, I slept for four years in tents in Afghanistan, and those were the nights I was comfortable. Many I night I lay on the ground with my pack for a pillow. So don't presume I require the comforts of a bed any more than you do."

Holmes actually smiled a little at this. "All the more reason, Watson, why you should take the bed now. You've certainly earned it."

"As if I would doze on a featherbed -- while you lay on the cold floor, like one of your street urchins."

To be truthful, the bed was wide enough for two, and was piled high with a homely quilt and surprisingly clean-looking linens.

"It's not at all cold. The fire is adequate. And I am not tired."

"Neither am I."

Holmes felt for his pipe but realised it had been packed in his bag. With a sigh, he tipped his head back against the wall, crossed his legs, and appeared ready to fall into one of his thinking trances, which in ordinary circumstances Watson was quite willing to endure, or even enjoy. Holmes didn't close his eyes. They were fixed on Watson.

"You have questions, Watson."

He did. He had what seemed like a hundred questions battling in his brain. Who had accused them of acts of gross indecency? Did Holmes know their accuser? How had they been so readily followed from London straight to Jessop's door? But the question fell from this lips without thought.

"These Hellbenders. . . they were of, ah, Oscar Wilde's persuasion?"

"You mean, were the Hellbenders lovers of men?"

"I suppose that is what I am asking."

This was a moment from which there could be no turning back. He had always taken Holmes's word that affairs of the heart, by which he had naturally understood Holmes to mean in respect to the fairer sex, were foreign to him as poison to the pure, mechanical operations of his peerless brain. The idea of Holmes being in any way associated with what was now a criminal vice, for which they were fleeing for their lives -- for being caught and charged with such a thing would surely be the end of them both as far as any sort of public life was concerned, regardless of the result -- had never occurred to him.

"Then the answer is, yes."

# # #

Watson was literally struck dumb. Holmes's pale eyes gleamed in the fading light of the fire as he studied Watson's expression. A snatch of a familiar song in the pub below, " _The Girl with the Golden Charms_ ," extolling the beauties of a fashionable blonde girl, drifted up. There was a burst of lascivious laughter. The silence stretched out.

Holmes's lip finally curled in a slight sneer that concealed, Watson thought, deep hurt. Although his tongue seemed to be frozen, his own thoughts were remarkably clear.   He could easily picture that "girl with the golden charms," and his wife Mary's somehow remote and mysterious loveliness. But nothing and no one made his heart ache and his blood thrum like the tall man who sat opposite him, angular and elegant and supremely guarded, patiently waiting for his closest companion to express his disgust and disappointment.

"I see," Watson finally managed with a strangled-sounding whisper. He cursed himself for sounding like that. It was like opening a door in his heart that had been long locked, and he had no doubt at all that it had been Holmes who had picked the lock with those clever fingers.

"You see nothing, although you are a man of the world. Well. We need not discuss it if it troubles you, Watson. We will see ourselves clear of these baseless charges, and then you shall be free to return to Mary."

Holmes resolutely turned his face away.

"Here now," Watson bristled, "I don't know what you mean by 'man of the world,' but I don't deny I'm surprised. You've always made it very clear that you were above all -- well, matters of the, ah, flesh."

"And so I am," Holmes snapped. "One's desires and ones actions are not one and the same, if one has discipline of mind and body. How often have you thought, Watson, _'I could kill that man_ ,' but you stay your hand for any number of reasons -- not the least of which is that it is illegal and will land you in prison if you are caught."

There was a discreet tap at the door.   Watson reached for his pistol but Holmes stayed him and opened it slowly, then brought in what was to Watson as though a gift from heaven above. The publican had kindly left a bottle of brandy and two pewter cups on a tray.

Watson didn't ask, but took the bottle, opened it, and poured them each a cup. The brandy was several grades lower than what he was accustomed to, reminding him of his early days in the Army when he would share standard rations with his men after losing his officer's portion of better spirits at cards.

Holmes, to his surprise, had already drained his cup and was pouring himself another. He rarely observed Holmes to be intemperate, excepting his abuse of cocaine.  

The cheap brandy burned all the way down, stirring the remains of what he had felt on the train, after the dose of Spanish Fly, or whatever it had been. It was not an unpleasant feeling.

These thoughts of drinking in Afghanistan naturally led to another reminiscence of Afghanistan, a lonely tent, another bottle of brandy, and two wounded men clasping one another in the dark.

# # #

The liquor had the effect of loosening his tongue, which was either about to be a very good thing or the very worst thing ever in his entire life.

"Do you mean to say . . . that you were in the Hellbenders, but -- only in, ah, spirit?"

Holmes glared at him fiercely. "Do you mean, have I ever committed acts of gross indecency? Assuredly not."

Watson's blood was on the boil now. Holmes seemed determined to cast him as a base, prurient accuser.   The truth was, now that the door was open, he felt he couldn't bear not knowing the truth.

"Damn you, Holmes! That's not what I mean at all."

"Then what the devil do you mean by these insulting questions? I believe I've said quite enough. I understand your revulsion and will do nothing, I assure you, to in any way violate our friendship, if that is what you will permit yourself to feel for one . . . such as me." Holmes started by nearly shouting, but ended on a broken whisper that wrung Watson's heart.

Watson pushed the tray aside and drew closer to Holmes. He gripped him tightly by the shoulders so that Holmes could not look away. He thought he had never really seen his dear friend clearly until now, the wounded light in his eyes telling a story that he should have understood long ago.

"What I mean is," he said very gently, putting his hand to Holmes's sharp cheekbone, "this." Their breaths were warm on each other's faces, they were nearly as close as they had been in the closet of the train, which Watson now admitted to himself had not been nearly close enough. Holmes's haunted, hunted look softened just a fraction.

"You're drunk, Watson," Holmes whispered. "Don't."

"I'm not drunk." He drew closer still, thrilling to the knowledge that Holmes was not drawing back from the touch of his hand against his face. "But I will stop, if you wish."

They were both trembling. Holmes's hand covered his own, and Watson closed his eyes. Would Holmes remove his hand, push him away? Almost reverently, Holmes took his hand and pressed his palm to his lips. Watson gasped at the shocking intimacy of the gesture.

"I don't wish it," Holmes whispered.

 


	10. Watson's Tale

Holmes lowered Watson's hand and with a gentle twist turned it over, still burning from the chaste kiss he had planted there, so that his golden wedding ring gleamed almost red in the light of the fire. Watson knew he should withdraw his hand altogether, and though it trembled, giving away his emotion, he did not try to suppress it. He thought his heart would burst, as a dizzying mix of shock, passion, fear, shame, and tenderness rocketed through his veins and set his heart thundering against his ribs.

Holmes gave his hand a firm squeeze to steady it, and then withdrew. He leaned back, shrouding his face in the dark. Watson knew well enough that Holmes was trying to prevent him observing whatever emotion was crossing that patrician face.

"Forgive me, Watson. I have no right --"

"No right? But Holmes -- please -- we should ---"

"You will leave me in the morning. It is not safe for you to remain here, nor to return to London. You shall take a separate train to Whitby. I will arrange passage for you, from Whitby to Italy. You will be safe there for a time, I will provide you with letters of introduction. Mary can follow as soon as you are settled."

Everything was far too fast. Just moments ago, he had felt as though it was possible that life might just be offering him something new, something possibly glorious, against any expectation he had ever dared to hold. Now Holmes was sending him away before he could properly comprehend what was happening, or what could happen next. In Afghanistan he had suffered through veritable hailstorms of cannon and bullets, and the more intimate terrors of bayonets and swords, sometimes all at once so that one's mind could not hope to direct the body in any intelligent response, and one was forced to react on sheer animal instinct. This moment felt less perilous than that and he knew he must not let animal instinct guide him now.

"I will stay here, Watson, and ensure that these criminal charges are dismissed, or if not, that they fall on me alone."

"I will do no such thing! I cannot fathom that you would believe that I would. I refuse."

"Think of Mary. Think of what it will mean to her if these charges are pursued against you, against us."

As a lad, Watson had jumped into an loch in Scotland once, on a dare. The profound shock of the icy water had stopped his breath. This cold dose of consequence shook him near as hard. His marriage was, he knew, not a happy one although they maintained a cool decorum and never sank to degrading arguments or accusations. His early infatuation with Mary had been no more than that. But he had thought that it had been more than time for him to establish his own household despite his meagre income from his erratic medical practice, and Mary had been far more willing than others had been to tolerate his irregular hours and devotion to adventuring with Sherlock Holmes. Or, if he was being honest with himself, his devotion to Sherlock Holmes.

Watson groped for the candle and pushed it so that Holmes could not hide in the dark. Holmes would not meet his eyes.

"Don't think I don't understand what you're trying to do."

"And what, pray, is that?" Holmes murmured softly.

"You're trying to -- well, create a diversion. By talking about the bloody charges. And. . . Mary. Just so I won't try to talk about-- well, what you just told me, and what we just did. Nearly did, at any rate."

"I don't believe that being arrested for gross indecency is a 'diversion.' Leaving aside the consequences to yourself, nor is the very real prospect of your wife being utterly disgraced."

"Not that I would consider it for a moment, it seems to me that if I were to flee to --where was it you said -- Italy? -- that it should be talked of, and that the implication would be clear."

"Not at all. A suitable story can be arranged to explain your travels. You are suffering a relapse of tropical malaria from your Army service, and require a warm, dry climate for recovery."

"I'm not bloody Keats! But there isn't any point, you know. I refuse to allow you to fall on your sword, Holmes. But we can talk about all that later. What I really want to talk about is what just, ah . . . happened."

Holmes gave a weak laugh with nothing of the harsh scorn that Watson had excepted. "Nothing happened. But it was still very wrong, and I apologize, Watson. Most deeply. It was unforgivable. I admit I was out of my head for a moment. Perhaps a few drops of cantharides were put in my coffee too, Watson. I have a resistance to most forms of poison, you know, from --

"Holmes! I remind you again that I am a doctor. You are perfectly in possession of your senses."

"It won't happen again, as you and I will part in the morning. Probably forever. That would seem best."

"You seem to have overlooked one critical fact, Holmes."

"While I admit that there have been occasions where I have overlooked critical facts, as you put it, I have not done so here."

"Oh yes, indeed, you have. You are overlooking the fact that I started it."

"No. You are quite wrong. Possibly you are still under the influence of that vile drug, then. You need quiet, and rest. They do say the worst patient is a doctor."

Watson bolted upright and stamped his foot in near fury. "Damn you! This is not something you can just -- bully me -- into pretending never happened! I will not be put off."

"Compose yourself, Watson. They will hear you. We must stay hidden."

Watson ignored this. He turned his back and pulled down the thick coverlet. He plumped the pillows. Then he began methodically, with a soldier's precision, removing his coat, his waistcoat, and cravat, then his boots, and at last, without false modesty or hesitation, his trousers. He stood before Holmes in his shirt.

"I am getting into this bed. If this is really the last night we are ever to spend together, Holmes, after so many years and so many nights, are you really quite certain that you want to spend it down there on the floor?"

He did not believe himself a coward, and knew that many would consider he had performed numerous feats of heroism both in war and at Holmes's side. But he thought that saying these words might have been the bravest thing he had ever done.

Holmes was still leaning back in the darkest corner of the tiny room, away from the firelight. He seemed to possess a hidden talent for drawing the darkness about him like a cloak when he wished it. Hidden or no, Watson sensed his unease. He did nothing to relieve it, letting the silence stretch out. He leaned against the worn, comfortable pillows, watching for a sign that Holmes might give up his struggle. He did not expect it, but he hoped. The tension in Holmes's lean figure made him think of the tautness of strings on Holmes's violin, that might create magical sounds if Holmes's hands were steady-- but would break when he was in his temper.

Watson knew he had won from the subtle rustling of Holmes's coat as he hesitantly unfolded himself from his position in the corner. He had carefully laid himself at the very edge of the bed to leave ample room should the impossible come to pass.

For a moment Holmes simply looked down from his damnably imposing height, a dark outline against the fading fire. Watson folded his hands behind his head, then was annoyed with himself for having done so. It might look as though he didn't trust himself, or Holmes, if his hands were free. And suddenly there Holmes was, lying beside him. He didn't, as Watson had expected, roll to the farthest side of the bed, or turn his back. Instead, he curled on his side, facing Watson with an expectant expression, as though he thought Watson had something more to say.

Truthfully, they had been this close before, but never when circumstances did not seem to require it. Here in this obscure garret, there had been a choice to be made, and it appeared that they had made it. Watson took a deep breath.

"I have something to tell you, Holmes."

"I would be honoured to hear anything you choose to say."

Watson didn't think he could bear Holmes's scrutiny just now, and fixed his eyes firmly on the low ceiling.

"You know I was wounded in Afghanistan."

"Of course. I will always be most . . . grateful that you recovered."

"After the bullet, an infection set in. I was feverish and quite unable to care for myself. It was feared I might have contracted something infectious."

"You were still at least a stone down when I met you."

"I suppose I must have been. At any rate, there was fear that my fever might be communicable. We had very little store of medicines and any general outbreak of fever could have killed my troop."

"I see. So they segregated you from your fellow soldiers. There was almost certainly no need, you were likely not infectious. Your wound became septic, yes?"

"They put me in a separate tent, far apart from the others. When I was able to judge for myself, the wound was partially healed. But I believe you are right."

And here was the sticking point. Having started, he wasn't sure he could go on. So much for bravery. Perhaps Holmes, with his preternatural ability to deduce every hidden thing, most especially things concerning John Watson, had already deduced his secret history, long ago. If Holmes knew it, he didn't need to say it aloud. Except that at this moment, he found that he desperately wanted to. Which of course meant that his tongue was tied.

They lay there like that, listening to the sound of spent coal and ash collapsing in the grate with a soft thunk, the faint rise and fall of voices from the pub below, a jumble of laughter, quarrels and drunken declamations.

"I was an officer and they did the best they could to make me comfortable, I'm sure. I'm not ungrateful. I came home. So many didn't."

He closed his eyes against the images that he could never forget, indeed felt duty bound to remember, men shattered not by bullets but by dysentery, men blown in half by mortar shell, men's flesh pierced and torn by swords, knives, bayonets. Blood and smoke and stink and screams. Some of it his own.

"My assistant surgeon, Lieutenant Nickerson, volunteered to tend me. I had saved his life, you see, in a close call in the mountains. The infection put me right out of my head for weeks. I was terribly weak, and I was utterly useless. And he saved my life. More than once, as I shall relate presently."

A great knot closed up his throat, and he couldn't go on. He tried to swallow past the lump but it seemed to make it worse. He passed his hand over his eyes, but could still sense Holmes's gaze on him, patient, observing, but not judging. He made a small exclamation, "No, Watson, never useless," but he couldn't acknowledge the reassurance. Not knowing what happened next.

"There was a surprise attack one night, in much greater force than we had been used to dealing with. I couldn't even stand, but I was just able to fire my pistol. We -- the troop, I mean -- beat them back. But we sustained very heavy losses. More men in one night than we had lost altogether up to that time.

"We were told we could not expect reinforcements for our position for at least five days, but that we must hold it."

Holmes leaned away, and returned with the brandy bottle in his grasp. He handed it over without a word, and Watson took a swig. It felt good to have it to cradle in his hands.

"NIckerson had to leave me alone that day, of course. We were more like a hospital camp by then than a fighting troop. But he came back to my tent when he had done all he could. We both drank more than we should have. It was our last bottle, I recall. And . . .and . . ."

"Watson, you need not tell me. I see that it pains you to think of. . . that time. You needn't say more. Truly."

Watson bared his teeth and nearly snarled. "Pains me? It should. It does pain me, every day, every single day, but keeping it quiet has done me no good. Nor others." His voice had raised and he stopped to take a few breaths, trying to steady himself.

"That night he helped me up, and we went out and looked at the moon. You haven't seen the moon, Holmes, until you've seen it from those mountains. 'The last moon we are likely to ever see,' he said. I didn't disagree with him. How could I? And then. Well."

He met Holmes's gaze, firmly and without shame. Holmes's eyes were wide and clear and unwavering. "We -- took pleasure of one another. I had never, ah, and he. . . it was-- well. I won't dishonour him by saying more. I would have said nothing at all, but--- he was right about his fate.

"We held our position as we had been ordered, vulnerable and weakened as we were. They attacked again at dawn. Nickerson didn't live to see the next moon. I ordered him to leave me, but . . . " The lump closed his throat again and he screwed his eyes shut against the everlastingly fresh memory of Nickerson standing over him fiercely, the horrible booming, the bloom of crimson across his chest.

When he opened his eyes, Holme's colour was up, and Watson imagined he was mortified by his tale.

"I see you are very shocked. Pardon me, I should not have burdened you--"

Holmes actually put a finger to his lips to quiet him. "My dear Watson --- I am honoured beyond anything you could possibly imagine, that you should deign to entrust your story to me. And you are quite wrong. I am not shocked. Surprised, perhaps. But we need not speak of what I thought, or did not think, before. What I think is of no consequence."

Watson gripped Holmes's hand in his, wondering at the heat of it. Holmes, in his experience strictly as Holmes' companion and physician, had almost preternaturally cool skin. He gripped the warm, fine-boned hand tightly. It felt quite marvelous, and he regretted very much that they had come so far and through so many adventures, risking their lives without stopping to hazard the cost, without risking this.

"I should not have asked about, well, whatever you might have done, in the Hellbenders or otherwise. Not without telling you my own story first. It was unfair of me. Because I want you to know, dear Holmes, that nothing about such acts between two men, men who share a regard for one another, should be called 'gross indecency.'"

The fire that Watson so loved to see kindled and flared in that bright eye, and he felt Holmes's breath quickening across his face. The doubts and fears of many years, implacable guardians that had always held him rigidly in check, finally retreated in the face of an unconquerable enemy, Holmes, gazing up at him with wonderment and hope.

He cupped Holmes's cheekbone with his palm, perhaps to steady himself, and drew in closer, on his guard for any sign that Holmes wished him to stop. There was none. He pressed closer still, until the coverlet bunched up between them, their bodies barely touching, his linen shirt against Holmes's waistcoat, his bare thigh against Holmes's fine wool trousers, his stockinged toes bumping Holmes's long boot, then entwining their feet, experimentally, to see how they might fit. Holmes's eyes fluttered closed for a moment as he leaned just slightly against the touch of his hand.

The last of the coal fire died, and a thin greyish glow from the gaslamp in the street below shone through the tiny, begrimed window. As if by design, the light struck his wedding band, as the fire had done. The gelid spike of truth pierced him then. Yet he could not bring himself to pull away. The silver-grey light showed up the vast dark of Holme's widened pupils and played over his supremely elegant profile, as though sculpted by one of the ancients, gifted by the gods, and he was unable to resist, drawing still closer until their noses rubbed, awkwardly, Holmes's lips trembling, breathing out as though he had been running, and then he was tasting brandy and tobacco on Holmes's lips, pliant but still under his, unmoving but not withdrawing, either. He was unable to resist pressing a bit harder, opening his lips just a bit wider, willing Holmes to give him a sign that he wanted more. He remembered the feel of Holmes's lips against his palm. The tiniest movement of his mouth parting a fraction, and the slight click of their teeth striking together, gave him his answer. He was dizzy as though he had taken a blow to the head, and wanted urgently to cling to Holmes's strong body, to brace and steady himself against that chaste mouth. His heart contracted the swelled, an exquisitely painful spasm of protective tenderness for this noble man.

He firmly if reluctantly dismissed the vision of their bodies, warm and entwined, nothing at all between them. He tore his mouth away with a small despairing groan. Holmes gave a quiet growl of his own, surprising Watson and sparking a deep, coiled, heated thing in his belly to unwind itself. He pulled the coverlet between them to conceal his arousal.

"Holmes."

"What is it? I did warn you, Watson, I am. . . ignorant in these matters. We shouldn't." Holmes pulled back the precise same distance as Watson had done, as though they were suddenly magnetic opposites. He sounded as nearly calm and composed as he ever did, but Watson felt the hurt in the question.

"It isn't you. I've tried to hide what I felt for so long, but I was certain you knew, because you know everything, always, and were being, well, generous in overlooking them. But -- I am not free."

Holmes looked away, his face now indeed as cold and set as marble. "Pray forgive me."

Watson sat up against the pillows. "It is clear where my duty lies."

"Of course. I would never wish you to betray Mary. You must--"

"Holmes. I am nearly always willing to be guided by your judgment. This is one matter, however, upon which you shall not dictate what I ought to do. I know what I must do."

He twisted the wedding band from his finger. It had never fit snugly and came off readily into his hand. He held it up to the light, so that Holmes could see. Then he placed it carefully upon his folded clothes on the little chest by the bedside.

"I will send word in the morning to Mary to come to me at once in Whitby. When she arrives, I shall tell her that we must part. If she chooses to remain my wife in name, I shall of course respect her wishes. But our marriage must be at an end from this very hour, Holmes."

Holmes sat bold upright beside him. "What are you saying? Are you quite out of your mind? I could never allow you to be so misled by my unworthy conduct as to break your vows to your wife!"

Watson folded his arms and regarded Holmes calmly. He had never been so certain of the rightness of a course of action in his life. Even though it ought to terrify him.

"I don't believe you understood me just now. You must agree that as between the two of us, I am in the best position to judge whether I should remain married to a woman to whom I can no longer give the proper devotion of a husband. And in truth have failed to give such devotion from the first."

"But -- this is folly! You promised you would leave England. You must. I will leave now, and you will no doubt come to your senses when I am gone, Watson."

"But I have come to my senses." He broke into a wholly inappropriate grin and took a swallow of brandy. The bottle was nearly spent. "After I've spoken to Mary and made proper arrangements, I intend to prove it to you, Holmes."

"Proper arrangements! Knowing your wife possibly better than you think I do, her idea of a proper arrangement might be pistols at dawn."

Watson rubbed his chin ruefully. "Quite possibly. But it's worth the risk."

Holmes gave him a look of such bafflement that Watson was sorely tempted to try kissing him again, just to prove his point. But honour must be maintained, even in this. Especially in this. Insomuch as was possible for a man currently subject to a manhunt for the crime of gross indecency with another man, specifically the man currently sharing his bed, if not the sense that he was beginning to dream of.

He climbed down to revive the fire with fresh coal, and turned to find Holmes quietly stripping down to his shirt and climbing under the coverlet. Watson rolled a blanket to make a barrier between them. After a few minutes of laying there, feeling one another's every small movement and breath, Watson extended his ringless hand over the little wall. With a soft, eloquent sigh, perhaps resigned, perhaps hopeful, Holmes took it up and clasped it in his own, and they did not move again until dawn.

 


	11. This Sodomite Vice

Bram Stoker sat quite still in the gathering dark. The fire that had warmed him and Hall Caine (or as he sometimes called him in private, “Tommy” or “Tommy-beg,” Caine’s Manx grandmother’s fond nickname) was gone cold, the lamps turned down low, the draperies drawn tight against even the faint glow of the gaslights in St. Leonard’s Court. 

The intrusion of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson tonight rankled, not the least because he thought that Caine’s moody, intense looks (despite his outward good cheer) had signaled that he wanted to impart something particular. Perhaps an idea for one of his new stories. Nothing was more entrancing than to listen to Caine tell one of his thrilling tales of love triangles, illegitimacies, or sometimes, the supernatural. 

They liked to tell ghost stories to one another of a night, especially when traveling. Like Stoker himself, Caine believed in second sight. Caine’s slim, fine hands mesmerised as he wove his tales before the snug fire in Stoker’s study. As Stoker had recorded in his private journal, Caine’s eyes “shone like jewels” when he told his stories, his pale skin and wild red hair making him seem “all aflame” in the rainbow-coloured flicker of his fire (produced by specially-procured logs of ship’s timber impregnated with salts.) 

The utter silence of this hour was a rarified pleasure for a man with the nervous sensibilities of a writer of fantasy, forced to live in the raucous conviviality of the Lyceum theatre company under the shadow of the domineering actor, the great Henry Irving. Soon, though, the morning sounds of the lamplighters extinguishing the gaslights would signal the coming of daybreak and the end of this treasured hour. But Stoker took neither pleasure nor peace from the darkness and silence tonight. He sighed and reached for the basket of firewood, and revived the fire. Perhaps the coloured flames would recapture the atmosphere of comfort and safety he craved.

But his heart still beat erratically, as it had done since Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson’s departure, and the dancing blue-green flames seemed more sinister than soothing. The familiar outline of his little sketch of the ruins of Whitby Abbey faintly glowed in the shifting colours. Sherlock Holmes had not failed to notice the sketch amongst all the crowded memorabilia in his sanctum sanctorum. Yet had been nothing in Holmes’s manner to signal any particular import to his attention to the sketch, Stoker reassured himself. 

# # #

But it was no use. _“Sherlock Holmes always has good reason for all that he does,”_ Doctor Watson, Holmes’s fierce amanuensis, had advised. 

His mind was unsettled to such a degree that his nerves, never strong, began to fail him. He poured a brandy and gulped it down like a tonic. Finally, his guilty hands inevitably drifted to the manuscript pages of his novel of vampire hunters in modern England, pursuing an ancient vampire, Count Dracula, from Transylvania, “the Land Beyond the Forest.” The book was entitled “The Un-Dead.” He had been working on the novel for the past six years, whenever his duties to the theatre and his family permitted-- which as Caine observed, was almost never. 

His fingertips worried the edges of the well-thumbed manuscript as he was absorbed by an image of his childhood self, sickly and fretful, being carried from bed to couch so that he might watch out the window at the hearty boys playing rough games in the little square. As then, a curious weakness stole over his limbs, leaving him in a state of near-paralysis, yet heightening his senses so that every slight sound quivered in his ear, and the faintest beam of light escaping the curtains pierced his eye and made his head ache. A particular manuscript page seemed to almost speak aloud to him in a commanding voice, a voice not unlike that of Sherlock Holmes. He pushed the manuscript from him.

On his desk, beneath his orderly stacks of correspondence and papers relating to the Lyceum theatre, a folded newspaper was carefully hidden. With trembling fingers he turned up the lamp to read, for perhaps the tenth time, the newspaper account of the final day of Oscar Wilde’s libel trial against Lord Queensberry, just a few days past. This edition recorded Lord Queensberry’s defence lawyer Edward Carson’s damning words to the jury, arguing what he believed to be the true nature of _The Picture of Dorian Gray:_

 ** _“. . . I believe that anybody who reads Dorian Gray will say that I am justified in what I am saying, it is the story of a man corrupted by another man, and who by such corruption is brought to commit, or the book suggests he has committed, this sodomite vice of which we will hear a great deal more, probably, before the case has closed. . .”_**

His blood ran as cold as his own invented solicitor Jonathan Harker’s at seeing the pale Count climbing the impregnable walls of his ancient castle, his black cape outstretched like the wings of a great bat. The evidence proffered against Wilde by Queensberry ensured that Wilde himself would be swiftly prosecuted for not being content to merely allude to the “sodomite vice” in _Dorian Gray_ by means of “symbols” -- _“those who read the symbols do so at their own risk,”_ as Wilde warned readers in his preface. 

# # #

Wilde’s sudden and inexorable downfall was a horrifying omen to a writer who, in creating his tale of the insatiable vampire Dracula, had gone even farther, perhaps, down the treacherous and seductive path of decadence and decay than Wilde himself. Stoker dashed away a bitter tear. He had since childhood been prone to weeping. He once wrote to the great poet Walt Whitman, his idol since his college days at Trinity, _‘how sweet a thing it is for a strong healthy man with a woman’s eyes and a child’s wishes to feel that he can speak so to a man who can be if he wishes father, brother and wife to his soul.’_

Stoker took a key from his waistcoat, opened a hidden drawer in his desk, and withdrew a slim sheaf of manuscript pages. He did not need to read them over, as he knew their contents by heart. He dipped his pen and ruthlessly forced his shaking hand to strike out certain lines, some of the earliest completed scenes in his long-gestating novel. 

Hot teardrops blurred the uncertain line and raised soft ripples in the paper as he struck out the words that he finally admitted to himself would never be seen by any other eye but his, a painful truth he had always known yet resolutely concealed from himself. The shocking public unmasking of Oscar Wilde made it impossible to believe otherwise. These words had been forged in a white-hot fire of imagination, driven by an illicit thrill but also, with the deep conviction that there was purity in this very pollution, a sentiment he imagined Dorian Gray would approve. 

Yet, Stoker swore he would not allow himself to regret having written this. His talent, he believed, was a pale shadow to the towering Henry Irving on stage, or dear Caine, who was second only to Dickens in the popularity of his tales. But in writing this terrible and decadent scene, he had been gripped by a compulsion that could not be denied, and he had not denied it-- one of the only instances of permitting himself to indulge in pure freedom that he could recall in a life strictly bound by duty and convention:

 _I suppose I must have fallen asleep. I was not alone. In the moonlight opposite me was the Count. I thought at the time I must be dreaming when I saw him for, though the moonlight was behind him, he threw no shadow on the floor. His great dark piercing eyes seemed almost red when contrasted with the pale yellow moon, his brilliant white teeth shone like pearls against the ruby of his voluptuous lips. There was something about him that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt a wicked, burning desire that he would bite me with those red lips and white teeth. It is not good to note this down, lest it should some day meet others’ eyes, especially Mina’s, to cause her pain and me shame or worse; but it is the truth._

_The Count advanced. I lay quiet, looking out under my eyelashes in an agony of anticipation. He bent over me till I could feel the movement of his breath upon me. Sweet it was in one sense, but with a bitter offensiveness underlying, as one smells in blood. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of his sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited -- waited with beating heart._

_But in that instant I sensed another presence in the room, and opened my eyes to see three pale women, two dark and one fair, approaching my bed with outstretched hands and fiery eyes. In a voice which, though low and almost a whisper, seemed to cut through the air and ring around the room: ___

____

_“How dare you try to touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I have forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me!”_

____

_The fair girl laughed with ribald coquetry, and said, “You yourself never loved, you never love!”_

____

_Then the Count turned, after looking at my face attentively, and said in a soft whisper:_

____

_“Yes, I too can love.”_

____

# # #

____

After several angrily discarded attempts at amending the passage, it now presented the three female vampires, and not Count Dracula, attempting to seduce Harker in his dreamlike languor.

____

Stoker was satisfied that the amendments had changed the entire tenor and import of the wild scene (“a wild desire took me,” Jonathan Harker said of his desire to search Dracula's sleeping person to find a key). The revised scene now effectively replaced Dracula with the female vampires, and invited his reader to compare the sexually aggressive, bloodthirsty female vampires with the virginal goodness of Harker’s fiancee and eventual wife, Mina. Dracula would pursue and seduce Harker’s wife Mina, not Harker himself. Stoker smiled a soft, secret smile. After all, he had pursued and won Oscar Wilde’s fiancee Florrie, causing her to break her two year engagement to Wilde and marry him instead.

____

This fresh thought of Wilde enforced his determination not to risk the stricken manuscript pages ever being seen by another living person. With nerveless fingers, he laboriously tore the pages into bits and threw them into the fire. The passionate and impure words were now forever lost, except in the deepest, most secret chambers of his heart.

____

Yet even with his consciousness of the risk, or possibly because of it, Stoker remained stubbornly determined to preserve a fragment of the incriminating, intoxicating scene that had so haunted him. Despite his fearful labour, Stoker found himself quite unable to destroy Dracula’s final words:

____

_“This man belongs to me, I want him. . . I too can love.”_

____

# # #

____

In later years, Stoker would tell his son that the idea for “The Un-Dead,” which would ultimately be published as “Dracula,” came to him in an indigestion-induced dream. This was less than a half-truth. He could hardly be expected to tell his son the real story. 

____

He cradled his head in his hands for a few long moments, his head aching. Then he rose, went to the shelf and removed the sketch of Whitby Abbey, tore it from its frame, and threw the fragments into the fire, where they threw up rainbow-coloured sparks before shriveling and shrinking, together with the scraps of the lost scene, into ash.

____

# # #

____

_“Have you received any correspondence of an unwelcome or threatening nature?”_ Holmes had asked, his resolute grey eyes seeming to read his secrets. Perhaps Holmes himself was gifted with the second sight. Otherwise, how did the man know that he had received such a letter, just yesterday? Stoker had actually considered confiding in Sherlock Holmes. But that was impossible.

____

He withdrew the letter from his secret drawer, and read it once more:

____

_Mr. Bram Stoker_

_18 St. Leonard’s Terrace_

_Chelsea_

_London_

_Dear Mr Stoker,_

____

_It was, as I am sure you must imagine, most unpleasant for me to await the post these past days with nothing from you. I will brook no refusal. If the article is not delivered into my hands tomorrow, you must be prepared for the consequences. I am certain I need not remind you of their nature. And when I mention consequences, I beg you to be assured that it is not to yourself only that I refer. You are advised to govern yourself accordingly._

____

_Come, Stoker, do not entangle yourself further in matters that are very far beyond your understanding, and relieve yourself of this thing which is destined to bring you only sorrow, and worse._

____

_M. Orloff, Count_

____


End file.
